The Philadelawareans, and Other Essays Relating to Delaware (Cultural Studies of Delaware and the Eastern Shore)

The Philadelawareans: And Other Essays Relating to Delaware

John A. Munroe

Newark: University of Delaware Press

The Philadelawareans

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Cultural Studies of Delaware and the Eastern Shore An Occasional Series Published by the University of Delaware Press Munroe, John A. The Philadelawareans. Giacco, Alexander. Maverick Management: Strategies for Success. Woolard-Provine, Annette. Integrating Delaware. Jones, Jacqueline. Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s. Munroe, John A. History of Delaware (4th edition). Boyer, William. Governing Delaware: Policy Problems in the First State. Hoffecker, Carol E. Honest John Williams: U.S. Senator 1947–1970. Pifer, Drury. Hanging the Moon: The Rollins Rise to Riches. Scott, Jane Harrington. Caesar Rodney: A Gentleman and a Whig. Shores, David. Tangier Island: People, Place, and Talk. Young, Toni. Becoming American; Remaining Jewish: The Story of Wilmington, Delaware’s First Jewish Community, 1879–1924. Hoffecker, Carol E., Richard Waldron, Lorraine E. Williams, and Barbara E. Benson, eds. New Sweden in America. Munroe, John A. History of Delaware (3rd edition). Schlenther, Boyd Stanley. Charles Thomson: A Patriot’s Pursuit. Custer, Jay F. Prehistoric Cultures of the Delmarva Peninsula: An Archaeological Study. Sweeney, John A. Grandeur on the Appoquinimink: The House of William Corbit at Odessa, Delaware. Bushman, Claudia L., Harold B. Hancock, and Elizabeth Moyne Homsey, eds. Minutes of the House of Assembly of the Delaware State, 1781–1792. Bushman, Claudia L., Harold B. Hancock, and Elizabeth Moyne Homsey, eds. Proceedings of the Assembly of the Lower Counties on Delaware 1770–1776, of the Constitutional Convention of 1776, and of the House of Assembly of the Delaware State 1776–1781. Custer, Jay F., ed. Late Woodland Cultures of the Middle Atlantic Region. Custer, Jay F. Delaware Prehistoric Archaeology: An Ecological Approach. Munroe, John A. History of Delaware (2nd edition). Weslager, C. A. The Nanticoke Indians—Past and Present. Munroe, John A. History of Delaware (1st edition). Hancock, Harold. The Loyalists of Revolutionary Delaware. Hoffecker, Carol E., ed., Readings in Delaware History.

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The Philadelawareans And Other Essays Relating to Delaware

John A. Munroe

Newark: University of Delaware Press

䉷 2004 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-87413-872-8/04 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.] Other than as indicated in the foregoing, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except as permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law), and except for brief quotes appearing in reviews in the public press.

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Munroe, John A., 1914– The Philadelawareans, and other essasys relating to Delaware / John A. Munroe. p. cm. — (Cultural studies of Delaware and the Eastern Shore) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87413-872-8 (alk. paper) 1. Delaware—History. 2. Philadelphia (Pa.)—History. 3. Delaware— Politics and government. 4. Delaware—Biography. I. Title. II. Series. F164.5.M86 2004 975.1—dc22 2003027281

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To Dorothy

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Contents Preface Acknowlegments Prologue: A Literary Autobiography

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1. The Philadelawareans: A Study in the Relations between Philadelphia and Delaware in the Late Eighteenth Century 2. The Eve of the Revolution 3. The New Castle Tercentenary 4. Nonresident Representation in the Continental Congress: The Delaware Delegation of 1782 5. The Ins and Outs of Politics: Early Nineteenth-Century Delaware 6. The Delaware Physician of 1800 7. The Negro in Delaware 8. Eight Newspaper Columns 9. Delaware as an Antique 10. Separation Day 11. The Old Collector (Allen McLane) 12. Reflections on Delaware and the American Revolution 13. Church versus State: The Early Struggle for Control of Delaware College 14. The First Map of Delaware after Statehood 15. Delaware and the Constitution: An Overview of Events Leading to Ratification 16. A Parson in Politics: The Expulsion of John C. Brush from the Delaware General Assembly in 1801 17. Three Nineteenth-Century Immigrants 18. The Trip to Philadelphia Index

29 52 70 87 113 123 135 152 173 177 181 219 233 245 250 268 283 294 300

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Preface REMINISCING IN OLD AGE ABOUT EVENTS, LARGELY HAPPY ONES, OVER THE last eighty years, it occurred to me that there might be interest in some of the articles I wrote during that period. Published in various places, they are not easily accessible today. Very few people have seen them all. In choosing items for this collection I begin and conclude with essays connecting Delaware and Philadelphia. The first is set in the late eighteenth century and appeared originally in a Philadelphia journal. The last, hitherto unpublished, was written for my friends and family and draws on my own experiences in the early twentieth century. The connection is an obvious one for me inasmuch as my serious historical studies began at the University of Delaware and the University of Pennsylvania, forty miles apart.

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Acknowledgments THE AUTHOR OWES GRATITUDE TO MANY PEOPLE FOR ASSISTANCE WITH this book. Far the greatest debt is due his wife, Dorothy, to whom the book is dedicated. She helped in various ways with all his previous books, but in this case she surpassed all her previous services—and at a time when help was needed. Others who deserve acknowledgment of their help include Timothy Murray and Rebecca Johnson Melvin in the Special Collections department of the Morris Library, plus many other members of the library staff at the University of Delaware, Russell McCabe and others at the Delaware State Archives, Barbara Benson, Ellen Rendle and Constance Cooper at the Historical Society of Delaware, and also Lonnie Hearn, Marcia Adams, Robert Barnes, William H. Williams, and my editor, Christine Retz, who also compiled the index. Over the sixty years I have benefited from the assistance of more people than I can possibly remember now. My three children, Stephen, Carol and Michael were particularly helpful in assisting their mother in coping with the intricacies of word processing. John A. Munroe Newark, October 2003

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Prologue: A Literary Autobiography HAVING LIVED LONG ENOUGH TO PROVIDE TIME FOR RECOLLECTION AND reflection I have enjoyed revisiting some of my literary ventures in the past. From an early age I was entranced by the idea of putting words on paper. I liked to talk too, to tell true or false stories, but I was too shy to speak publicly. I came by this interest naturally for my father was a born storyteller and excited my interest by his stories through his long life. I have written ‘‘Tales of My Father’’ in an unpublished article for my children. My father’s tales were factual—or were meant to be. I remember coming home from elementary school (No. 23. in Wilmington) and telling my parents, particularly my father, tales of events at recess that were wholly imaginary. I think he knew they were. One of my aunts had a relationship with a newspaper—she was listed as an officer of the firm publishing The Sunday Star—and this connection might have encouraged my interest in writing. At any rate, when I was in the eighth grade at a middle school, M. Channing Wagner, an administrator from Wilmington High School, interviewed me and each of my classmates in order to draw up schedules at the high school for these incoming ninth graders. ‘‘What do you want to be?’’ he asked me. ‘‘A journalist,’’ I replied, or maybe I said ‘‘a newspaper man.’’ ‘‘All right,’’ said Mr. Wagner, ‘‘then you’ll take ancient history, along with Latin, mathematics, and English.’’ Most of my friends took general science instead of ancient history, but the choice was a good one for me. I loved the subject and it was the only ancient history course I ever took. Among the many outside activities I participated in during these high school years (1928–1932) was a stint on the school paper, both as a reporter and as an advertising solicitor. But I found working on the school literary magazine, the Whisp, much more fun. Importantly, it was more of a group enterprise. When production time neared, members of the staff gathered after school to plan the set13

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up of the issue, to assign topics, read copy, correct spelling, and so forth. I liked the members of the group and could name many of them today. For example, one Whisp staffer was Edmund Fuller, who became a prominent literary critic and eventually chief book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. He wrote short detective stories on the exploits of one Herlock Sholmes. Marie Curran wrote stories about gnomes. Irvin Malcolm was joke editor. Walter McEvilly and Bill Baldwin were also involved prominently—Walter as the editor. I wrote historical articles on such subjects as the Olympic games, the history of mathematics, and the two thousandth anniversary of Vergil’s birth. They were short and they were dull. I wonder whether anyone read them besides my mother. I didn’t know what kind of career to plan for when I went to college. There was no question where I would go. I could only afford to go to the state university, which proved a good choice because I had health problems and as a commuter I could get the right food and sufficient rest to see me through a period when I had several blood transfusions. When one of my aunts suggested I should become a high school teacher I was appalled at the thought. But at college I nevertheless prepared for a teaching career because the Great Depression had hurt my family and I needed to be able to make money. Further schooling after college—as for a career in law—was not to be considered. As a freshman I took courses in English, history (European), German, mathematics, chemistry, and botany—one more subject than usual because I was excused from physical education and military training. I decided quickly that the first three subjects were the fields for me and continued with them in future years, avoiding mathematics and science. I had to add education courses to qualify for a teaching job, and also chose classes in economics and sociology. At Delaware I did a small amount of writing for the school paper, the Review, but I soon gave it up, probably because being a commuter left me little time for reporting and, frankly, I guess I didn’t care much for the work. I participated in reviving a literary magazine, The Humanist, and wrote an account of an interview with a Belgian organist employed by Pierre du Pont at Longwood but regularly loaned to the university for concerts at Mitchell Hall. I also wrote brief sketches of classmates for the yearbook but was angry at the editor’s failure to let me (or anyone else) correct the copy.

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As my senior year began, in September 1935, I started to worry about getting a job. For graduation I needed only two courses, both of which I was taking. One was Practice Teaching and the other was an education course that went along with it. When these courses were completed I would have all the credits I needed for graduation. I was registered for two other courses, fourth-year German (with only one or two other students in the class) and a history course with Professor George Ryden (I believe it was European Diplomatic History) which Ryden was giving me independently because the scheduled time for the class conflicted with Practice Teaching. The country was still suffering from the Great Depression and jobs were hard to find. I knew students—good students, too—who had been graduated in June and still had not found jobs in the fall. My experience practice teaching was encouraging. Dr. Alice Van de Voort (the only female professor I had at Delaware) had shown her usual good sense in assigning me to work with an intelligent, lively woman, Mrs. Dorothy Marshall, at Wilmington High School. She had such good control over her class that discipline was no problem and all lessons could proceed as they were planned. Emboldened by this experience, I told Professor William Wilkinson, chairman of the education department, that I wanted a job and would be free to leave college and go to work at the end of the term, in January 1936. Through a friend of my father I had secured an interview with the superintendent of schools in New Castle, but, as expected, he had nothing available in the fall term for which I could be considered. After the Christmas vacation, when classes resumed for the few weeks remaining in the semester, Professor Wilkinson asked me to stop at his office. There he advised me to see the Newark superintendent, Carleton Douglass, who might have a place for me—I could, and he did. A junior high school social studies teacher had died suddenly during the vacation (I afterwards learned he had committed suicide), and after a brief conversation I was offered the job. ‘‘By the way,’’ Mr. Douglass added, ‘‘the man you will replace liked to teach some mathematics. He had two seventh-grade classes, but they’ll give you no trouble; you need to know only enough to keep a checkbook.’’ I didn’t admit I had never had a checkbook, and as I left the office I saw a graduate from the ’35 class, a good student, waiting to see Mr. Douglass to apply for the job that now was mine. I began my long teaching career on (if I remember correctly) Jan-

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uary 13, 1936. College classes still had a week or so to go, but scarce as jobs were my teachers were glad to excuse me from further attendance. I suppose I had to take some final examinations, but another teacher with a free period would take over any high school class I had to miss. Similarly, when my college graduation took place in June other teachers met my classes while I walked one block from the school on Academy Street to Mitchell Hall on the college campus. When the ceremony was over, I walked back to the school, stuck my diploma in a desk drawer, and resumed teaching, happy to have a job. After a few weeks I had been relieved of the mathematics classes in return for one in American history and one in world history, both in senior high school, which was in the same building as the junior high. For one and a half years I continued with a similar schedule, mainly teaching ninth graders. In 1937 I was offered the chance to replace the senior English teacher, who was leaving. I liked the idea, for now that I knew I enjoyed teaching I wanted to teach older students, hoping some day to teach in college. First, however, I called on Professor W. Owen Sypherd, the old respected chairman of the English department at the university. Was I prepared, I asked him, to teach English in high school to juniors and seniors? (I had taken a number of elective English courses as an undergraduate and was taking another as a graduate student in the summer of 1937 when this opportunity arose.) Sypherd approved my taking the English position, which satisfied me. I knew he was no easy mark who would simply agree to what a questioner wanted. So for the next two years I taught English to most of the juniors and seniors at Newark High School, which had graduating classes of only seventy-five to a hundred students. Teaching English at this level was fun because the material being read could be changed from term to term. But it required a lot of time. Every student paper had to be read completely. If I assigned a theme I had to devote four evenings to reading the papers. Every summer I took graduate courses at the University of Delaware, thus completing all the courses required for the M.A. degree in four years. In this time, I saved what I could from my salary, which rose from $1,285 a year to $1,500. Then, in 1939, I resigned my job to attend graduate school full time at the University of Pennsylvania. I wanted to become a college professor, mainly because I thought the work would be intellectually more satisfying than high school teaching.

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But what subject should I study, history or English? I decided that English would make a fine hobby, but that I would rather give serious study to history. Or to political science? I flirted with this thought for months and was sufficiently attracted to the idea that when I applied to graduate schools political science was the subject I proposed to study. In my spring vacation in 1939 I went to the Penn campus in Philadelphia to meet the political science department chairman. I left him not convinced that this should be my field. I was particularly bothered by a list of recommended books. Probably they stressed theory too much for my taste. I had a decent background in international relations but in government I had very little training—only one course in American government, and not a good one. (The professor was so dull that I used to memorize poetry during his lectures.) I also visited Johns Hopkins University, and here I had a more favorable reaction. I liked the chairman, who later wrote a good biography of Roger Taney, and I liked a young professor I met (V. O. Key) who was working on Southern politics. I was pleased to be offered a tuition fellowship at Hopkins, with promise of something better in a second year if my work was satisfactory. I intended to accept the Hopkins scholarship, but practical questions intervened. If I did, I would need to live in Baltimore and the $600 I had saved as a teacher would not go far. My parents, with whom I had been living, were worried about my health. I suffered from a bleeding disorder called purpura and had had seven or eight blood transfusions, though none in the last three years. If I went to Pennsylvania I could commute by train to Philadelphia—a distance of only twenty-seven miles with service at least hourly. Since Baltimore was more than twice as far from my Wilmington home it was not practical to think of commuting there. So finally I yielded to family persuasion and decided on Pennsylvania. This decision also allowed me to change my mind about the field I would study. I was uneasy about political science but I knew I liked history. So I made the change. When I completed my registration in Penn’s graduate school of arts and science I was enrolled as a Ph.D. candidate in history. Directed to Professor Arthur C. Bining for help with a schedule, I told him I wanted to minor in political science. ‘‘Very reasonable,’’ he responded. ‘‘There should be provision for it. But there isn’t.’’

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And that was the end of my ambitions for political science. The immediate problem was to consider what fields of history I would select for my concentration. Ph.D. candidates were examined in five fields at the close of their studies (before writing a dissertation). I liked all fields of history, as far as I had examined them, and I had been particularly attracted to the Middle Ages, but prudence directed me to American history. As I registered war was breaking out in Europe, and no one could think of going abroad to study. Even had there been no war I could not think of going abroad to study; I couldn’t afford even to live in Philadelphia.Without some study abroad (such as research on a dissertation), I would be at a disadvantage compared to other young historians, but in American history I could be—as far as preparation was concerned—as good as anybody. American history as a field of study was divided by the Penn department into two chronological periods, early and late. Besides the two American fields, I chose to concentrate on English history, medieval history, and Latin American history, these fitting into certain broad categories that the department established. Penn demanded that all course work for the Ph.D. be completed within five years of the comprehensive examinations. All of my summer courses at Delaware, even those in English and economics, had been accepted by Penn, but they dated back to 1936 and I feared some credits might expire. I did not want to take one more course than necessary, and yet I wanted to be able to interrupt my pursuit of the Ph.D. whenever a good position was available. If I sealed my studies at Delaware by taking an M.A. degree there, the credits would be frozen, recognized by Penn everlastingly. Consequently, I spent most of my time in the summers of 1940 and 1941 writing an M.A. thesis at Delaware. When I received this degree in September 1941 I had already completed all required course work on a Penn Ph.D., but the comprehensive examination and the dissertation lay ahead. For the academic years beginning in September 1940 and September 1941 I held a teaching assistantship at Pennsylvania, meaning I received a small stipend plus free tuition. I had not known of the availability of such an appointment before, or I would surely have applied in 1939. My principal duty was to teach three discussion groups each week after the students heard lectures in American history from Arthur Bining or Roy Nichols. I was glad to be a teacher again, though the best part of the job was having a desk of my own

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with other T.A.’s, in a crowded little room off the department office. Being a commuter, I was glad to have a base on the Penn campus, somewhere to hang my hat and leave books and papers, and I also enjoyed the companionship of other T.A.’s, of whom there were about a dozen. I was happy I had chosen Penn, both because of this appointment and because of another matter. Shortly after I began my studies there, in 1939, I began to have signs that my bleeding problem might be on the way to a serious hemorrhage. After a series of blood tests my doctor ordered me to stay home. For about six weeks I was kept home, but finally, when no hemorrhage had occurred, I was allowed to resume commuting but told to avoid steps as far as possible and to come home each day as soon as my classes were over. Through this period I was able to read and write and therefore to keep up with all my classes. But had I been in Baltimore I would have had to withdraw and come home and my dreams of doctoral studies would have been ended. Probably it was the excitement of quitting my high school post that caused this scare. At any rate, my health never again interrupted my work. I was certainly stressed in the fall of 1941, as I prepared to take the oral comprehensive examinations in the five fields I had chosen. I had to continue my duties as a T.A., but otherwise I had no course work to do and could concentrate on reading, allowing so many weeks to each of my fields. I took these long-dreaded examinations in January 1942, and found them not bad at all. My courage bolstered, I reflected on my next step, which was to write a dissertation. But my teaching assistantship now seemed more of an impediment than a help. I expected the dissertation would take me about two years of concentrated work. The assistantship paid me only a very small sum ($300, I believe), plus tuition, which was worth much more than the emolument. But free tuition was of no use to me now. With my new confidence I phoned my good friend and admired teacher Francis Squire, who was acting chairman of the history department at Delaware. I knew, of course, that the chairman of the Delaware department, George H. Ryden, had died in the fall of an illness that afflicted him rather suddenly, just after he had read my M.A. thesis. Would the Delaware department need an addition for the spring

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semester, I asked, thinking it better to be making a full salary, however modest, than the miserable pittance paid an assistant. ‘‘Indeed we might,’’ was the burden of the answer. ‘‘Could you come down and see me in my office this weekend?’’ Of course, I could, and in that meeting my future was settled. For one term, that is, I would join the Delaware faculty as a history instructor at $1800 a year. My hope was that I could save some money (commuting now to Newark instead of Philadelphia) for the future. And, oh, what a grand feeling it was to be a faculty member, not a T.A., and at my old school, where I had many friends on the faculty and even some cousins or family acquaintances in the student body. I was what I wanted to be. The dangerous leap from a secure job teaching to the uncertainty of an aspiring graduate student had paid off. An older man, a first cousin of my grandfather, had seen me waiting for a trolley in Wilmington in the fall and asked what I was doing. Going to the University of Pennsylvania, I answered. ‘‘Good heavens, John,’’ he said. ‘‘Are you still in school?’’ I was twenty-seven and embarrassed. What would happen when the term was over? My colleagues declared they wanted to keep me on, but President Walter Hullihen insisted that the place of Ryden, the senior scholar in the department, must be filled at the least by someone with a Ph.D. And so it was. But to give me a chance to put aside more money for lean years ahead, the department arranged that I should teach two courses in summer school. Those summer weeks passed quickly, and immediately afterwards I got to work on my dissertation. Roy Nichols had arranged for me to return to the Penn campus as chairman of the T.A.’s at a slightly (very slightly) enhanced salary. Then one day late in the summer as I sat in the Historical Society of Delaware, working on my dissertation, Henry Clay Reed, one of my late colleagues at Delaware, reached me by phone. Could I possibly return to Delaware for the academic year that was about to start? Reed had, he explained, been offered a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton. Late as it was, President Hullihen would approve a leave if his place could be filled satisfactorily. Thus the offer. But as a friend, Reed felt he must warn me. ‘‘If you go back to Penn now you can write your dissertation and get your Ph.D. in two years. But if you come to Delaware you’ll be five years completing your dissertation.’’

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He was right, yet returning to Delaware was so much more attractive than being a T.A. at Pennsylvania that I did not hesitate long in making my choice. I did hope to keep working on my dissertation while teaching, and the fact that I had chosen a Delaware subject was encouraging. Originally while at Penn I had planned to write on the lyceum movement, a sort of adult education program featuring itinerant lecturers. But a list of works in progress that I saw included this subject with the name of a man I never heard of again. (It was not Carl Bode, who eventually produced a fine book on lyceums.) I was scared off this subject and retreated to local history, where I would be sure to hear about it if anyone sought to appropriate my subject. I would write on Delaware in the Revolutionary period. This had the advantage of being a relatively cheap subject—that is, I would not need to travel far in my research. Furthermore, I would be building on a background I had already acquired. My M.A. thesis, written under George Ryden, had been on ‘‘The Relations between the Delaware Legislature and the Continental Congress,’’ a subject he had suggested. In two seminars at Penn I had added to my knowledge of Delaware in the same period. In Arthur Bining’s economic history seminar I worked on the maritime history of Delaware in the late eighteenth century. And in Roy Nichols’s political history seminar I studied the Delaware delegation in one of the early Congresses. However, the first scholarly paper I ever published came out of my aborted studies of the lyceum movement. The editor of Delaware Notes, which published articles by members of the Delaware faculty, asked me for a paper and I gave him one based on research I had done for Richard Shryock’s seminar in social history, entitled ‘‘The Lyceum in America before the Civil War.’’ Published in 1942 (volume 7), it featured an account of an early lyceum in Wilmington. My hope of making progress on my dissertation had to be set aside in 1943 when I agreed to take over some of the work of the alumni secretary, who was going into the navy. My main duty would be to produce four issues of the University News, an alumni magazine, for each year while carrying on, with a secretary’s help, the correspondence of the office and offering support to an annual fund drive. Other activities, like clubs, were largely suspended during the war. For the magazine, I wrote almost every word, dictating much of it. It mattered less than otherwise that I was giving up research on my dissertation because in these wartime years I needed to keep busy.

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Most men of my age were now in the armed forces, and the archives and historical societies where my research would take me were now populated mainly by elderly women or by retired men absorbed in genealogy. Through these years I remained a civilian because of my history of bleeding and of blood transfusions. (My bleeding problem disappeared when I reached my thirties, as I had been told it would.) I still lived in Wilmington with my parents, but I was away all day and often far into the evening, when I had to catch up with alumni work, not only on the magazine but also on an extensive correspondence with men now scattered over the globe. I had continued teaching full time. The history department needed me because the Women’s College remained, and though most undergraduate men had departed, they were replaced by army trainees required to take a history course on the background of the war. In these years I began to be called on frequently for speeches, sometimes on local history, sometimes on a broader perspective. The years I had spent teaching had allowed me to overcome the shyness that once made me hesitant to address a class. On the contrary, I now felt more at home in front of a class than in most social situations. It did not matter whether the class numbered in the hundreds or was just twenty-five or thirty students, though I preferred the smaller number, for I might get to know them. However, I still recall the first class I taught at Delaware. It was in February 1942 when Professor Squire, who had taught this class in the previous term, introduced me and left the room. For just a minute or two before I took over, my eyes watered and I couldn’t see. It was an emotional moment. Here I was, where I had hardly ever hoped to be. Teaching in college, yes, I expected that, but there was a special thrill in teaching in my alma mater. Immediately after the war ended I resigned my alumni duties and devoted all my free time to my dissertation. After a year of research I started writing it in the fall of 1946 and finished in the spring of 1947. My chairman, H. Clay Reed, helped me by arranging a very convenient schedule and my wife typed my manuscript drafts as soon as I gave them to her, even though she was caring for our first child, born in June 1946, and was also teaching part time in the chemistry department. When I finished the dissertation I turned to three chapters I had promised Professor Reed for his Delaware, A History of the First State,

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published late in 1947. Two of my chapters required only a boiling down of material in my dissertation, but the third chapter, a political narrative of ‘‘Party Battles, 1815–1850,’’ was based on new research. For one of the first talks I was called on to make off-campus I chose as my subject, Dr. James Tilton. It was his birthday, I believe, and I was fascinated with this man, a distinguished Delaware physician who wrote on many subjects. In the course of my career I turned my attention to Tilton many times. I thought of editing a volume of his writings, including such of his letters as I could find, but I never went ahead with this project. My first Tilton piece was probably the most useful. It was Tilton’s ‘‘Notes on the Agriculture of Delaware in 1788,’’ which R. O. Bausman, an agricultural economist, joined me in editing. I had discovered Tilton’s manuscript among the records of the old Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, housed in the library of the Veterinary School of the University of Pennsylvania. In its Memoirs, now rare, the society had published Tilton’s notes as answers to a long list of questions from a French scientist. Bausman and I published these questions (not previously in print) with Tilton’s answers in Agricultural History in 1946, adding what we could on the background of these manuscripts and their significance. Another Tilton work on quite a different topic that I edited was his anonymously written partisan political history of Delaware in the Revolution, published originally as a pamphlet entitled Timoleon’s Biographical History of Dionysius, Tyrant of Delaware. My edition, with extensive commentary, was published by the University of Delaware in Delaware Notes and as a separate pamphlet in 1958. Years later I edited Tilton’s ‘‘Observations on the Propriety of a Farmer Living on the Produce of His Own Land’’ in Delaware History, volume 28 (1998). I found the bachelor doctor’s views on what his contemporaries called household husbandry to be amusing. For the American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2000) I wrote short sketches of the lives of Tilton and of six other Delawareans. Among the short pieces I wrote in these years were Delaware Becomes a State, a history of the revolutionary period that fit in a group of pamphlets on Delaware, published through the university’s Institute of Delaware History and Culture (1953), and Delaware, A Students’ Guide to Localized History, which was one of a series of booklets issued by the Teachers’ College Press of Columbia University (1965). The latter work was republished several times, both by the University of Delaware and by Delaware State University, Dover.

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My doctoral dissertation had meanwhile been published in 1954 as Federalist Delaware, 1775–1815, by the Rutgers University Press. (A paperback reprint edition was published by the University of Delaware in 1976.) My long labor on a biography, Louis McLane, Federalist and Jacksonian, ended in 1973 when Rutgers published this book, on which I had toiled off and on for seventeen years. Much of my writing could only be done in the summer because for most of this time, from 1952 to 1969, I served as department chairman. I was also diverted from my writing by responsibilities for graduate work conducted with the Winterthur Museum and with the Hagley Museum and Library. The essay, ‘‘The Museum and the University,’’ which appeared in The Curator (from the Museum of Natural History in New York), in 1953, derives from that relationship. When I resigned the history chairmanship in 1969 I was soon hard at work on Colonial Delaware, a book I had promised for a series Scribner’s projected on each of the thirteen colonies. Scribner’s abandoned the project when only a few titles had been published, but the KTO Press, a unit of the British Thomson firm, took over and completed the series. Eventually KTO gave up its hardback editions, and the Historical Society of Delaware quickly remaindered Colonial Delaware, which is, therefore, out of print. I had meanwhile taken on a new literary responsibility in 1969, when Charles Lee Reese, Jr., asked me to succeed him as editor of Delaware History, the semiannual journal of the Historical Society of Delaware, which Reese had edited since its founding in 1946. I continued as editor until 1995, but much of the work was done by a managing editor. Before Colonial Delaware was published (in 1978) I began writing my next book, a History of Delaware. The Delaware Bicentennial Commission, created by the legislature to help celebrate two hundred years of independence, helped the university finance a year’s leave so I could work on this book, which was needed for a college course in Delaware history. Since its initial publication in 1979, this book has been reprinted three times (most recently in 2001), each time with a short addition. In 1978, while my History of Delaware was being printed, I was anticipating my retirement when Richard Bushman, then department chairman, and President E. Arthur Trabant invited me to consider writing a history of the University of Delaware for the institution’s 150th anniversary as a college. (Chartered in 1833 as an outgrowth

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of the 1743 Academy of Newark, the school had admitted college students in 1834.) After talking over the problems and pleasures of writing an academic history with friends who had written histories of their colleges, I agreed to undertake the proposed task, with the aid of a reduced teaching schedule for my final years. I wrote The University of Delaware—A History between 1979 and 1983. My research was mainly carried on in the university archives, where I enjoyed the cooperation of John M. Clayton, then university archivist, and his staff. When I began writing I moved to a study room in the Morris Library. During this period I took some time out to join Professor Carol E. Hoffecker in writing Books, Bricks and Bibliophiles: The University of Delaware Library. I wrote the first half of this book, which was published by the university in 1984. Historians have an advantage over many other scholars in being able to continue their work after retirement. I did no more teaching after I retired in 1982, when I was sixty-eight. Although I had enjoyed teaching I was glad to be free of the chore of grading tests and reading term papers. I frequently accepted invitations to speak and I continued to do some writing, as items in this book attest. I was very happy to be a history professor. It seemed the best job in the world for me.

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1 The Philadelawareans: A Study in the Relations between Philadelphia and Delaware in the Late Eighteenth Century In 1944 when I was teaching at the University of Delaware as a history instructor and also serving as alumni secretary I was asked to speak to a group of Pennsylvania historians who were living and working in Washington during the war. Left to choose my own subject, I picked one that I thought would appeal to them. This paper was originally written to be read to an audience, though I usually spoke from notes. After my talk, on November 24, 1944, a resume, prepared by someone in the group, the Pennsylvania Historical Junto, was circulated in their newsletter. I do not recall how much this essay was changed when I dressed it up for publication. I showed it to Judge Richard S. Rodney, an authority on this period in our state, and, though generally encouraging, he was critical of my title, which was simply ‘‘The Philadelawareans.’’ He said he liked titles that clearly indicated the contents of a scholarly article. His comment led me to add a subtitle. The contents show how I had exploited sources related to Delaware in a political history seminar with Roy F. Nichols, in an economic history seminar with Arthur C. Bining, and, to a lesser degree, in a social history seminar with Richard Shryock, all at Pennsylvania, as well as in previous work with George H. Ryden at Delaware.

‘‘HAVEING MADE AN APPOINTMENT THREE WEEKS AGO TO GO TO PHILAdelphia with Mr. Abraham Winekoop I fixt on this day to set of— before I was quit Ready I went Round the Town To bid my friends fare well.’’1 So Thomas Rodney began, on September 14, 1769, his journal of a trip from Dover to Philadelphia. It was, of course, a considerable 29

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journey that he was undertaking. Philadelphia was three days to the north—a glamorous cosmopolis that would afford young Rodney an endless round of tea, grog, and coffee drinking with friends, of visiting the ships on the river, and of playing billiards in Spring Garden. But such pleasant dalliance soon exhausted the youth and he hastened back to the Lower Counties and to a tryst with his sweetheart.2 The time of Rodney’s trip and the formality of his farewells indicate the relative isolation of central Delaware in his day. Compared with the 1940s, when one might even commute from Dover to Philadelphia, the isolation was indeed great. Most especially was this true of Kent and Sussex counties. New Castle County, northernmost of the three that comprise Delaware, was fortunate in lying athwart the main land route of travel from Philadelphia and the North to Baltimore and the South. Through Kent and Sussex, however, almost no one found his way, unless he was interested in those two counties themselves. No cities of any size existed on the peninsula; and the flat plain that today lures motorists southward-bound to choose the peninsular road to the Cape Charles ferry then provided few temptations to the traveler. On each side of this three-hundred-mile long jetty are natural waterways that the pre-macadamite eighteenth century preferred to its roads—interminable stretches of ruts and rocks alternating with inadequate bridges, fords, and ferries. The Chesapeake and the Delaware, with, when it had terminated, the Atlantic, too, coursed on each side of Delmarva both to its advantage and its detriment. To its advantage they brought shallops and barges up its creeks, its Appoquinimy, Mispillion, and Nanticoke. To its disadvantage they allowed coastal trade to bypass its towns, barely flirting with New Castle, Port Penn, and Lewes on the way to New York, Charleston, or Cap Franc¸ ois. Yet in spite of the difficult distances of the eighteenth century, Delaware’s three counties perched beside their river found themselves inexorably drawn into the cultural, social, and economic sphere of the river’s metropolis, that colossus to the north, of whose prospects a local booster had written as early as 1730: Europe shall mourn her ancient fame declined and Philadelphia be the Athens of Mankind.3

Back and forth between the Quaker-founded city and the Lower Counties traveled a human throng in the late eighteenth century— physicians like James Tilton, Nathaniel Luff, John Vaughan, and Ed-

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ward Miller; printers like James Adams and Hezekiah Niles; writers like John Parke and William Cobbett; lawyers like James Bayard and Gunning Bedford; preachers like Morgan Edwards and Matthew Wilson; mechanics like Oliver Evans and John Fitch; gentry like Benjamin Chew and John Dickinson; soldiers like Washington and Howe; distinguished foreign visitors like the Duc de la Rochefoucault Liancourt and Francisco de Miranda; and innumerable shallopmen and postriders whose names have long been forgotten. Nor did the men proceed alone; they carried a baggage with them, not merely of Spanish lace or plaster of paris or Madeira wines or fine furniture, but an assortment of ideas to be displayed in the marketplaces of the mind. Thus the American Athens cast the light of her learning into a segment of her rural Attica. Up the Delaware to Philadelphia the produce of the farms and forests was carried—Indian corn and wheat from New Castle and Kent, shingles and boards from Sussex. Back again the vessels came to the farm landings and village wharves with ‘‘a patern of cloth’’ and ‘‘Jersy Chees’’ and ‘‘Virginia Twist Tobacco’’ and other goods easily procured in a cosmopolitan mart. But sometimes the wheat was ground at home, and proximity and reputation brought Conestoga wagons rolling down the hills from Lancaster and Chester counties with more grist for the Lea mills at Brandywine or the Latimer mills at Newport on the Christiana.4 From these merchant mills ships loaded the cargo easily, by grace of Oliver Evans’s devices, and carried it directly overseas or, more often, to Philadelphia, where it was transshipped to larger schooners. In Thomas Mendenhall’s Wilmington yard near the Foul Anchor Inn, thirty wagons sometimes stood at once, waiting overnight to be loaded on Philadelphia-bound sloops.5 John and William Warner advertised in 1798 that their ‘‘fast sailing packet boat with every accomodation for passengers’’ would run to Philadelphia as soon as the plague had subsided and added that the trade of those who had flour to ship was solicited.6 The Bush line in the 1790s supplied de luxe passenger and freight service between Wilmington and Philadelphia on their new packet, the Nancy, at a rate of fifty cents a head. Meals were served on the ship, breakfast and supper costing twenty-five cents each and dinner twice that sum. The trip took from six to nine hours, departures, which depended upon the tide, being signaled by the ringing of a large bell on the Wilmington storehouse of the firm. In this storehouse the Bushes kept the flour, salt, plaster of paris, and fish that

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they offered for sale. So profitable was the packet business that Captain Milner of the Nancy bought, with some partners, another sloop with which he began to compete with the Nancy for the Philadelphia trade in 1794.7 New Castle, too, had her share of the river commerce. Joseph Tatlow in 1775 started running a packet there from Philadelphia, while a complementary line was begun on the Chesapeake between Frenchtown and Baltimore, the New Castle and Frenchtown wharves being connected by a stage line that was established in the same year. Thus a short easy transit was provided from Philadelphia to Baltimore, down the Delaware by packet to New Castle, across the head of the peninsula by stage, then by packet again to Baltimore.8 So popular was the line that New Castle once again came to rival Wilmington as a port. Though most of Delaware’s foreign commerce moved through Wilmington, yet there stopped at New Castle ‘‘as great and perhaps a greater number of vessels . . . during the summer and fall seasons . . . , generally those in the Irish trade and those bound to Philadelphia, where parts of their cargoes belong to Baltimore.’’9 In 1794 the Insurance Company of North America purchased two hundred and fifty tickets in a ‘‘Lottery for building Piers at New Castle,’’10 which indicates that this conservative Philadelphia enterprise felt deeply concerned about a Delaware port.11 Even small towns like Newport and Christiana were terminals for stage-boat lines established by John McCallmont and the Hollingsworths. Indeed during the Revolution the protected Christiana route along which they lay became an alternate to the New Castle– Frenchtown road in providing communication between Philadelphia and Baltimore free of danger from the British fleet.12 Since that fleet raided commerce on the Delaware Bay, its activities hampered the normal intercourse between downstate Delaware and Philadelphia, diverting some of the trade to New York and thus encouraging ‘‘trading with the enemy’’ and the general cause of Toryism in southern Delaware.13 This threat to the Philadelawarean connection became so bothersome that Delaware’s legislature empowered the executive ‘‘to fit out barges to cruise on the bay and river of Delaware for the protection of the trade thereof.’’14 Delaware’s roads like Delaware’s river led to Philadelphia. From the southern end of the peninsula one road ran north through Horn Town (Virginia), Snow Hill (Maryland), and Dagsbury, Milford, Dover, and Wilmington to Marcus Hook, Chester, and Philadelphia. Northwestward from Wilmington the roads to interior

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Pennsylvania shortened the path for Lancaster and Chester County products en route to Philadelphia via Christiana River wharves. West from Wilmington the highway from Philadelphia continued to Newport, Christiana, and the Head of Elk Creek, in Maryland, where the traveler might choose between continuing on land to Havre de Grace and Baltimore or embarking for a sail down the Chesapeake. Southward from Wilmington to New Castle lay a much traveled section of the road running on downstate past the Red Lion Tavern to Dover. Christiana Bridge, which is today pronounced ‘‘Christeen’’ by the natives, was connected at the Red Lion with both the southern highway and with New Castle. From the Red Lion another popular route led southwestward to Warwick, Maryland, and on to the Chesapeake’s shore. From this Eastern Shore road and from the main road down Delaware, various other roads reached back into the interior, to Georgetown, new seat of Sussex County, and to the coast, at Lewes, old county seat and port.15 Thus the whole provided a network of communications which the peninsula’s shape tightened at the top and directed toward Philadelphia. To be sure, these roads offered no attraction in themselves. Travelers bore many difficulties with varying amounts of patience. Thomas Rodney relates how he and his wife-to-be, Betsey Fisher, traveled north from Dover ‘‘Very Safe Till We Came To Patersons Mill, who’s Dam had been broke by the Storm—When We Came there, Betsey got Down and Walk’d behind the Chair, and I got out and Lead the Horse—about Midway the Dam we had to go of [sic] on one side, and as it was Very Steep going down the Chair was Like to Over Set. I Immediately Stopt the Horse to Run and Right it—but before I got to it the frollick began. it Tiptd over Quite Topse Tirve and Scared the horse So that he took of [sic] and the first jump, the Spring Struck against a Large Logg that Lay in the way which broke the Carriage all to Shatters Leaving Nothing Whole but the Wheels and Box.’’16 Coming down the same road nineteen years later Rodney again had trouble crossing a stream. Near the present-day town of Smyrna he dismounted to lead his horse over ‘‘the bridge that crosses the Mill run at Duck Town, it being very Much rotten and broken, . . . but there being an ugly hole just at the foot of it, the Horse got scared and jumpt round it, and by that means jumpt on my right foot.’’17 The erratic Mr. Rodney’s chair and his foot were not the only casualties of early Delaware travel. The Duc de la Rochefoucault Lian-

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court found this state ‘‘distinguished by the bad condition of the roads, and by the bridges, which are almost all constructed of wood.18 Over them, however, were brought the mails, south, like the duke, from Philadelphia.19 Regular stagecoach lines were established, and through them Delaware was linked to Philadelphia in still another way. Along the routes of communication from Philadelphia to Delaware came a steady flow of printed matter. Philadelphia newspapers circulated in the Lower Counties, as their advertisements and their letters from readers indicated.20 Almanacs, magazines, and books came to Delaware from the same source or at least by way of it. Lists of subscribers printed in the back of many of the Philadelphia books of the period give proof of the literary interests of Delawareans.21 Not content with importing printed matter from Philadelphia, Delaware obtained from that city the person of its first printer. Like many a member of his profession this man, James Adams, was an immigrant from the north of Ireland, in his case, Londonderry, where he had learned his trade. In Philadelphia he had worked for Franklin and Hall, who did some official printing for the Delaware legislature. No doubt it was through this connection that Adams was encouraged to come to Wilmington and set up the state’s first press in 1761.22 Nor did Adams terminate all business connections with Philadelphia on coming to Wilmington. He is known to have lent the services of an apprentice to another Irish-born Philadelphian, Mathew Carey. With him he also exchanged oversupplies of the books that he sold in his shop.23 The famous publisher of The Register, Hezekiah Niles, is another printer who might be called a Philadelawarean. Reared in Wilmington, he was apprenticed at the age of seventeen to Benjamin Johnson, a Philadelphia printer. In three years with Johnson, Niles must have learned his trade well, for he eventually became known as ‘‘the fastest typesetter in the business.’’24 Returning to Wilmington in 1797, he collaborated with James Adams’s son John in the publication of an almanac. After publishing sermons and political essays he formed, in 1799, a partnership with Vincent Bonsall, which lasted only two years when the firm failed after publishing an edition of John Dickinson’s Political Writings.25 Shortly thereafter Niles moved to Baltimore, where ‘‘his opportunity for success as a publicist was much greater than it ever had been in Wilmington,’’ since the Delaware city ‘‘had too many printers and was close to Philadelphia, the center of the art.’’26 Printing was not, of course, the only Delaware

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John Dickinson (1732–1808). For much of his life Dickinson had homes in both Philadelphia and Delaware. Etched by Albert Rosenthal, Philadelphia, 1888, after a painting by C. W. Peale. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington.

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business that maintained close connections with Philadelphia. Something has already been said of the trade in agricultural and forest products. Prices current for the Brandywine flour mills were regularly listed in the Philadelphia newspapers, and properly so, for those mills were the principal part of an industry so considerable that a New England geographer of the period claimed, ‘‘Wilmington and its neighborhood are probably already the greatest seat of manufactures in the United States.’’27 Moreover, the greatest part of this flour was bought by Philadelphia merchants for exportation.28 One can hardly speak of the Delaware flour mills without recalling the name of their greatest mechanic, Oliver Evans, a true Philadelawarean. Born in or near Newport in 1755, son of a cordwainer turned farmer, Evans was apprenticed to a wheelwright, whom he later left to join his brothers at their mill. Early in his life the examination of a Newcomen atmospheric engine persuaded him ‘‘that there was a power capable of propelling any waggon, provided,’’ as he wrote, ‘‘that I could apply it; and I set myself to work to find out the means of doing so.’’29 While engaged in the attempt to perfect an amphibious steam dredge, his Orukter Amphibolus, he invented various labor-saving devices for the milling industry, which were patented to him in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware, and by the federal government.30 The promotion of this work together with the preparation of his first book31 probably caused him to sell his share in a mill on the Red Clay Creek, Delaware, and move to Philadelphia in 1792.32 The remainder of his life contributed to the enrichment of that city’s cultural history, though his contribution was insufficiently appreciated in his day.33 Social contacts and family relationships linking Delaware and Philadelphia were so numerous that rare was the Delawarean who did not have friends or relatives in the metropolis. The renowned seamstress, Betsy Ross, for example, was married to John Ross, son of the Reverend Aeneas Ross, rector of Immanuel Church, New Castle. The playwright and novelist Robert Montgomery Bird was reared by his uncle Nicholas Van Dyke, also of New Castle. Pennsylvania governor Thomas Mifflin was related to the rugged Quaker abolitionist and prohibitionist, Warner Mifflin, of Kent County. Chews, Rodneys, Reads, Dickinsons, Bayards, Gilpins, Shallcrosses, Leas— and so on through the roster of the Lower Counties’ first families, almost without exception—all had similar connections.34 These connections were constantly strengthened by visits back and forth. Health, pleasure, and business occasioned a constant

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commerce between the areas. The Delaware politician who arrived in Philadelphia to attend Congress spent some of his free time in looking up old acquaintances, as did the student and the merchant. In turn, Philadelphians sought out their friends from the country when the city was ravaged by the plagues of the 1790s35 or when the changing fortunes of politics brought temporary disfavor, as to a Dickinson or a Chew. And then, as now, many Delawareans came home to die. Through the society of both places flitted the tragic figure of Mary Vining, sister of a congressman, acquaintance of noblemen, beloved of a dashing soldier. The Vining gaiety that made the brother and sister politically and socially so charming led to the family’s downfall. John Vining was Delaware’s first member of the United States House of Representatives and was justly famous for his oratorical ability and his promise as a trial lawyer. But he flourished early and for a short time only. Improvidence, drink, and disease seem to have ruined his career, though an early death spared him a disillusioning age. Mary was not so fortunate. After Anthony Wayne’s death she retired from the gay world and devoted herself to the care of her brother’s children. Let her be remembered as she is in 1783 when the Venezuelan patriot, Miranda, met her in Philadelphia with her friends, Peggy Chew and Sally Shippen. A woman, he described her, whose conversation ‘‘is sought after by strangers and men of good taste.’’ ‘‘A mixture,’’ he added, ‘‘of bizarreness and capriciousness in her conduct produce often an almost incompatible contrast with her singular knowledge and good ideas.’’36 Not so favorable is the picture painted of her a decade later by the Anglo-Irish refugee, Hamilton Rowan, who knew her in Wilmington. ‘‘And now for Miss V.—eternally gabbling French,’’ he wrote his wife. ‘‘She is never happy unless when talking of the Compte de Lucerne, the Duc de Biron, and other French nobles who were here during the revolution. She wears rouge from her chin to her head, I believe, and is about fifty.’’37 Voluntary societies further strengthened the bonds that casual social intercourse or the chance of relationship had knit. Most of the Masonic lodges in Delaware, including those of Middletown, Wilmington, New Castle, Dover, Smyrna, and Lewes, were members of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, until in 1806 a schism, attended with much bad feeling, resulted in the establishment of the Grand Lodge of Delaware.38 In 1794 ‘‘at a respectable Meeting of Citizens of New Castle

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County in the town of Newcastle,’’ according to a contemporary newspaper account, ‘‘it was unanimously agreed to form themselves into a political Society.’’39 This group, which called itself the ‘‘Patriotic Society of Newcastle County, in the State of Delaware,’’ might seem, considering the date of its formation, to be a local copy of the Philadelphia Democratic Society and of the other similar societies then prominent throughout the nation. This suspicion is furthered by the presence among the members of such ardent democrats as Dr. James Tilton, gruff but likable eccentric, and Robert Coram, English-born schoolmaster and Revolutionary sailor whose work Professor Beard has recently discussed in his American Spirit.40 But certain other names among the list of members—Kensey Johns, John Stockton, James Booth—suggest that caution should be exercised in any political evaluation of this group.41 At any rate the presence in Philadelphia at the beginning of this decade of Caesar A. Rodney, nephew of the war governor and first prominent official of Jefferson’s party in Delaware, hints at a Philadelawarean relationship in the development of this first strong party organization.42 Other Philadelphia societies had their influence on Delaware. A society to promote the manumission of slaves was founded in Delaware in 1788, thirteen years after a similar society had appeared in Philadelphia.43 Warner Mifflin worked as valiantly for the abolitionist cause in Delaware as did Anthony Benezet in Philadelphia. Nor did Mifflin confine his efforts to this state. He traveled to every yearly meeting and would have gone abroad if a general meeting of ministers and elders had not disapproved his plans in 1786.44 Mifflin frequently visited Philadelphia either to attend meetings of Friends or on business, for his wife had considerable property there.45 Shortly after the Battle of Germantown he passed, without passport, through both the British and American lines in order personally to urge Howe and Washington to end the war through a compromise. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur was so taken by this adventure that he described it at length in his Letters of an American Farmer. Brissot de Warville repeated the tale, and soon Mifflin was receiving congratulatory letters from France.46 Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society, America’s premier learned society, had several Delaware members, among them Dr. James Tilton and Dr. Nicholas Way, the latter of whom endeared himself to Philadelphians by the care he gave refugees from the yellow fever epidemics. Many more Delawareans were members of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture and their letters re-

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specting agricultural experiments in Delaware were often published in the society’s Memoirs. In the first volumes of these Memoirs,47 for example, were articles by William Young, of Brandywine, ‘‘On Smut in Wheat,’’ and by Dr. Tilton ‘‘On Peach Trees,’’ and ‘‘On the Fruit Curculio.’’ The second volume48 contained articles by William Young; Major Philip Reybold, ‘‘grazier,’’ of Delaware City; Abraham Perlee, of Wilmington; Dr. William Baldwin, of Wilmington; and the Reverend Dr. Charles Wharton, of Prospect Hill. The membership in Delaware included Peter Bauduy, refugee from Haiti and architect of Wilmington’s Old Town Hall; James Bellach, of Dover, whose opinions on peach trees were quoted by Richard Peters;49 Eleazer McComb, state auditor of Delaware and merchant of Wilmington and Dover; Vincent Lockerman, farmer and politician, of Dover; and Major John Patton, congressman, of Kent County. Most of the leading religious denominations also contributed to strengthen the relationship between Philadelphia and Delaware. After the Duke of York’s grant of the Lower Counties to William Penn, the Society of Friends naturally became interested in this territory as a prospective field of settlement. Wilmington largely owes its growth to first importance in the state to a Friend, William Shipley, who moved there in 1731 from Ridley, Pennsylvania. His interest in the town, according to tradition, was aroused by his wife, ne´ e Elizabeth Levis, who first saw it when she was making a visitation to the Friends of Maryland and Delaware.50 Friends’ groups in Delaware remained affiliated with the Philadelphia yearly meeting, and some local members such as Warner Mifflin and Dr. Nathaniel Luff seem to have gone to great pains to be in attendance upon the central body.51 Before the Revolution most of the great landholders of Delaware were members of the Anglican communion. After independence was won, the Protestant Episcopal Church held much of the old membership and regained most of the old prestige of the Church of England. In the fall of 1786 a general convention met in Wilmington and signed testimonials for the elevation of William White, Samuel Provoost, and David Griffith to the office of bishop by the hierarchy of England.52 Delaware comprised part of the diocese of Bishop White from the time of his consecration until 1804.53 Ministers of the church in Delaware often had close personal relations with Philadelphia. So the Reverend Aeneas Ross, of New Castle, was a brother of John and George Ross, the Pennsylvania statesmen. Charles Wharton, Maryland-born ex-Jesuit, was a member of the

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Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, his interest in it having already been noted above. The Reverend Samuel Magaw transferred his pastoral care from Dover, Delaware, to St. Paul’s, Philadelphia.54 In the mid-eighteenth century the most rapidly growing denomination in Delaware was the Presbyterian. The Presbytery of New Castle had been formed in 1716 by a division of the Presbytery of Philadelphia.55 From it the Philadelphia Synod permitted the Lewes Presbytery to separate itself in 1735 and, after a period of reunion, again in 1758.56 Both the Lewes and New Castle presbyteries were within the jurisdiction of the synod of Philadelphia. This synod patronized the academy founded at New London, Pennsylvania, by the Reverend Francis Alison and removed to Newark, Delaware, by the Reverend Alexander McDowell, from which institution Delaware College developed in the next century.57 In this school Charles Thomson, John Ewing, Matthew Wilson, James Latta, Hugh Williamson, David Ramsay, Thomas McKean, George Read, and James Smith, many of whom could be called Philadelawareans, were educated. Many of the members of the Presbyterian ministry helped personally to tighten the bonds between Philadelphia and Delaware. Such was the effect of Francis Alison’s continuing interest in the academy he had founded, even after he had left it to become rector of the Academy of Philadelphia in 1752 and vice-provost of the college in 1755.58 Dr. John Ewing, provost of the University of Pennsylvania, went to England in 1775 with Dr. Hugh Williamson to solicit funds for the Newark Academy.59 Matthew Wilson, ardent Whig and rector of the Lewes church, was granted the degree of doctor of divinity by the University of Pennsylvania. His son, James Patriot Wilson, became pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia.60 John Miller, Boston-born pastor of the Dover and Smyrna churches, was awarded the master of arts degree at Pennsylvania in 1763. Two of his sons who were educated at the University of Pennsylvania afterwards became very distinguished men in their fields, Edward as a physician and Samuel as a minister.61 A phenomenon of the late eighteenth century was the rapid progress of Methodism on the Delmarva peninsula. As soon as organization was achieved by the Methodists, Philadelphia became their nominal regional center, for Delaware was part of the Philadelphia Conference. The seat of the conference in the 1790s, however, seems to have been Smyrna, Delaware, and the peninsula rather

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than the metropolis was the real center of this faith.62 The emphasis that was placed on spiritual conversion rather than on education robbed the cultural center of the influence it might normally have been expected to exert on Delaware Methodism. Its ministers came directly from the farms rather than by way of the schools of the city. Only as Methodist organization developed to the point where it needed certain urban facilities did Philadelphia begin to exert much cultural influence on Delaware through this denomination. After the Methodist Book Concern was established in 1792 in Philadelphia, the usual Philadelawarean ties began to form, for the Reverend Ezekiel Cooper was called from his Wilmington pastorate in 1798 to become its director.63 Richard Bassett, the most distinguished Delaware Methodist layman of the eighteenth century, was well known in Philadelphia. Sometimes called the richest man on the peninsula, with homes in Wilmington and Dover and on Bohemia Manor in Maryland, Bassett became a very ardent convert. A chapel in Dover was built largely by his support. He frequently spoke at St. George’s Church in Philadelphia and was known as a ‘‘sweet singer.’’64 So great was his love for the Wesleyan hymns that at camp meetings he used to pitch his tent near those of the Negroes so he could hear their music, which he called his harp.65 Bassett’s daughter, his only child, married James A. Bayard, of Philadelphia, and through this connection has arisen the longest senatorial dynasty in American history, every generation of this family having produced at least one United States senator since Bassett himself was elected to that office in 1789.66 Another sect which was growing fast in the late eighteenth century was the Baptists. They too maintained an organizational tie with Philadelphia, for most of their congregations in Delaware were members of the Philadelphia Baptist Association until they formed a separate state association in 1795.67 The most interesting figure among the Delaware Baptists of this period was the Reverend Morgan Edwards. Born in Wales in 1722, he became a minister at the age of sixteen. He was pastor of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia from 1761 to 1772, when he resigned and moved to the Welsh Tract, near Newark, Delaware, where he had bought a farm on which he lived until his death in 1795. Historian of the early Baptists, founder of Brown University, frequent lecturer on divinity in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New England, Edwards is reputed to have been the only Tory among the American Baptist clergy during the Revolution.68

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The medical and legal professions, even more than the ministerial, bound Delaware to Philadelphia. Late eighteenth-century Philadelphia was particularly renowned for the quality of its physicians and as the American center of scientific knowledge, so it is not surprising that most of Delaware’s leading physicians studied there. One of the most distinguished men produced by the Lower Counties in this period was Edward Miller, son of the Presbyterian minister at Dover. After studying at Newark Academy and with Dr. Charles Ridgely in Kent, he proceeded to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he was granted the bachelor’s degree in 1785 and the doctorate in 1789. He practiced for a while in Somerset County, Maryland, and in Kent County, Delaware, but moved in 1796 to New York, where he became famous as a founder and editor of the Medical Repository, port physician, and professor in the College of Physicians and Surgeons.69 The Dr. Ridgely just mentioned had also acquired his medical training in Philadelphia, where he had studied at the academy and with Dr. Bond. Returning to Dover to practice, he took an active interest in politics, becoming by the outbreak of the Revolution the acknowledged leader of the court party in Kent County. Politics was not an unusual avocation for a Delaware physician. Usually a man of this profession was the best educated person in his neighborhood and was looked upon by his neighbors as a master of knowledge, a guide through all perils. Such was a role that James Tilton never shunned. This sentimental, excitable, rough old bachelor delivered lectures to philosophical societies, answered with a lengthy essay a French scholar’s request (sent him via the Philadelphia Agricultural Society) for information on the state of Delaware agriculture, surveyed the history of Delaware’s climates and diseases for Philadelphia’s Dr. Currie, published a fiery pseudohistorical denunciation of Delaware’s leading politician, and discoursed at length on the virtues of what he called a ‘‘Virgilian breakfast’’ and the evils of such foreign imports as tea, wine, and fine cloth. After studying at Nottingham Academy, he attended the University of Pennsylvania and was graduated with the first class granted medical degrees in the English colonies. He kept his contact with Philadelphia through his membership in the Philosophical Society and the Agricultural Society and his correspondence with Benjamin Rush. As an army surgeon during the Revolution he devised the Tilton hut, which afforded ventilated, warm housing and saved the lives of many of Washington’s soldiers during the winter spent at Morris-

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town. A staunch patriot, he served as state legislator, treasurer, congressman, and as first surgeon general of the United States Army during the War of 1812. It was characteristic of the man that among all his achievements, he took a fierce pride in the fact that he appeared at a White House reception dressed not in the foreign imports that he hated, but in good Delaware homespun. Of his Pennsylvania classmate, Dr. Nicholas Way, mention has already been made. Another Pennsylvania graduate was Joshua Clayton, physician and congressman and first governor of Delaware, the father of one senator and the uncle of another, and the collateral ancestor of still a third, the present Senator Clayton Douglass Buck. Another physician-congressman was Henry Latimer, who studied in Pennsylvania and at Edinburgh. The same schools were attended by Dr. George Monro. The Philadelphia connection, which is so apparent in the case of these physicians, is equally obvious in regard to the Delaware lawyers of the late eighteenth century. George Read, the leader of the Delaware bar during the Revolution, studied law under John Moland of Philadelphia and was admitted to practice in that city at the age of nineteen. His brothers-in-law, George and John Ross, were Pennsylvania lawyers and politicians. His friend and contemporary, John Dickinson, was born in Maryland, reared in Kent County, Delaware, and studied law in Philadelphia. After marrying Mary Norris, Dickinson divided his adult life between Pennsylvania and Delaware, being, in 1782, governor of both states at the same time. Another contemporary, and equally a Philadelawarean, was Thomas McKean. Born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, he came to Delaware to study law with a cousin, David Finney, of New Castle, and remained in this state to win fame and political preferment. In 1771 he moved back to Philadelphia and was chosen chief justice of Pennsylvania in 1777, but served concurrently for several years as congressman from Delaware. Gunning Bedford, a cousin of Delaware’s governor Gunning Bedford, the terms ‘‘Junior’’ and ‘‘Senior’’ usually being applied to the men respectively for clarity, was born in Philadelphia and was educated at Princeton. After studying law with Joseph Reed in Philadelphia, he moved to Dover and became attorney general of Delaware. James A. Bayard was also born in Philadelphia and educated at Princeton. After studying in the law offices of Reed and Ingersoll in Philadelphia, he too came to Delaware and soon began a distinguished political career. The formula was reversed by Benjamin Chew, who was born in

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Maryland but moved at an early age to Delaware with his father, the elder Chew becoming an important official in the colonial courts of the Lower Counties. After studying law in Philadelphia with Andrew Hamilton and in London at the Middle Temple, he was admitted to the bars of both Delaware and Pennsylvania and divided his time between these two states until he took a house in Philadelphia in 1754.70 Though he still retained an interest in Kent County, where he owned considerable property, his life thereafter is chiefly part of the Philadelphia story. A discussion of the Philadelphia connections of Delaware’s lawyers leads naturally to a similar discussion of the state’s politics. Here is found what may well be a unique situation in American politics. On February 3, 1782, the General Assembly chose a new delegation of four to represent Delaware in the Continental Congress. The oddity of the case lies in the fact that of these four men only one was at that time a resident of Delaware—and that one man, Caesar Rodney, was dying of cancer and did not attend Congress during this term. Of the other three delegates, one, Philemon Dickinson, was a New Jerseyite, and two, Thomas McKean and Samuel Wharton, were Philadelphians. Several reasons for this surprising experiment in a typically English form of nonresident representation may be suggested. First, the salaries of the delegates were to be paid by the states and Delaware was often slow in appropriating funds for this purpose.71 The financial sacrifice involved in attending Congress caused many Delawareans to refuse to serve there. For men who had homes in Philadelphia, however, no such sacrifice was entailed. Second, the initiation of government under the Articles of Confederation in 1781 made the attendance of two delegates necessary for a state’s vote to be counted. Since a division of the two would void that vote, three members was the only satisfactory delegation. The choice of one or more Philadelphians in the delegation simplified the problem of meeting the attendance requirement. A third reason for the choice of nonresidents may be the Philadelawarean connection. Consider the position of the nonresidents whom Delaware chose. Philemon Dickinson, Thomas McKean, and Samuel Wharton represented the landholding-mercantile aristocracy of the Delaware River Valley. Rodneys and Dickinsons, Reads and Whartons were essentially of the same economic class; that some resided in Philadelphia and some in Delaware occasioned little division in their respective interests. As a matter of fact, these

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families showed a tendency to expand over four states in a single generation. Both Dickinsons and Reads came from Maryland through Delaware to Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The Baynton and Wharton firm’s debts in Delaware were collected by George Read.72 The presence of his cousin in New Castle had helped draw Thomas McKean there. For these men whose interests extended, like the goods they sold, beyond the narrow limits of one state, it must have seemed a very convenient and quite satisfactory arrangement to have Delaware represented in Congress cheaply and with regularity by able men who were living in the capital. ‘‘I am bound,’’ wrote John Dickinson, upon his election to Congress by Delaware, ‘‘to prefer the general Interest of the Confederacy to the partial Interests of Constituent Members. . . .’’73 This was the point of view of the Philadelawareans, coupled only with a human unwillingness to consider that the ‘‘general Interest of the Confederacy’’ could ever truly be in opposition to the enlightened and expanding interest of their own group. Between 1776 and 1779 John Dickinson was three times elected to Congress by Delaware, but he twice refused to serve, having withdrawn into comparative obscurity for a time after his opposition to the Declaration of Independence had hurt his political prestige in Pennsylvania. Eventually, however, he returned to political prominence as Pennsylvania’s governor, achieving that position via the governorship of Delaware, to which office he was helped by his old friend, George Read. Thomas McKean was eight times elected to Congress from Delaware, serving there from 1774 to 1776 and again from 1777 to 1783, including a period of almost four months in 1781 when he was president of this legislative body.74 The last period of his service in Congress occurred after his election as chief justice of Pennsylvania. The excellent attendance record that he compiled in Congress attested to the correctness of Delaware’s judgment that residents of the capital would more frequently appear in Congress if elected to it than would residents of Delaware. In their brief year in Congress Samuel Wharton and Philemon Dickinson also attended more regularly than had most Delaware delegates in the past. The experiment in nonresident representation, however, was not continued after 1783. Particularism reared its head in Delaware and joined with party politics to oust the nonresidents. Emphasis has been placed throughout this paper on the professional and commercial classes of Delaware, those to whom the Philadelawarean

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connection was particularly dear. But there was another Delaware, that of the small farmer, off the roads most traveled, too busy with his agrarian chores to be conscious of the unifying Philadelawarean culture of the valley. This Delaware it was which rose in provincial fury to sweep the nonresident delegates from office in 1783 and replace them with a group of impeccable Delaware residence, of no congressional experience, and of little demonstrated interest in attending the confederate legislature.75 Though the Philadelphia influence on Delaware was paramount, other influences undoubtedly existed. The European influence was strong, but it usually came by way of the Quaker city. So too did the influence of New York and New England. West New Jersey had more direct access to Delaware across the river, but West New Jersey was only another part of the Philadelphia cultural province. Only a Chesapeake Bay culture has any valid claim to rivalry, and its influence is hard to gage. The printers, Adams and Niles, set up offices in Baltimore; Baptist, Methodist, and Catholic ministers entered Delaware principally from the west and south; important families like the Reads, Dickinsons, Chews, and Bassetts came to Delaware from the Eastern Shore. But the Eastern Shore itself was being drawn into the Philadelphia orbit (Tilghman and Bordley are examples of this) and so had a distinctive claim only on Delaware’s southwestern corner, the region around Laurel, where roads and rivers ran toward the Chesapeake rather than toward the Delaware River. And the river gave Philadelphia an advantage that Maryland could not overcome. Not so, today. Varied means of transportation and communication render the river highway less important. Today the first state draws its political issues in large part from Washington, its romantic ideas from Hollywood, and much of its general intellectual development from New York. Washington and New York, indeed, are but two hours farther distant than Philadelphia. But in the eighteenth century, when the complexities of life were more local in nature, Philadelphia’s influence was supreme and the Philadelawarean culture was very real.

Notes 1. From an address delivered before the Pennsylvania Historical Junto in Washington on Nov. 24, 1944. 2. Thomas Rodney, Journal of a Trip from Dover to Philadelphia, Sept. 14 to 22, 1769, Rodney MSS (Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington).

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3. ‘‘Poetical Description of Philadelphia in 1730,’’ Historical Magazine 4 (New York, 1860): 344. 4. Jedidiah Morse, Abridgment of the American Gazetteer (Boston, 1798), 197. In the Pennsylvania Packet of Philadelphia for Feb. 11, 1790, appears a survey of the mills on the Brandywine. 5. J. Thomas Scharf and others, History of Delaware, 1609–1888 (Philadelphia, 1888), 2: 750. 6. Wilmington, Delaware and Eastern Shore Advertiser, Jan. 4, 1798. The Warners and James Hemphill were running competing packets to Philadelphia in the fall of 1799. Wilmington, Mirror of the Times, Nov. 20, 1799. 7. Samuel Bush began a regular service to Philadelphia in 1774 with the thirtyton sloop Ann. Before this there had been no regular communication between Wilmington and Philadelphia, and merchants plagued by the long day’s journey by land or water had gone to Philadelphia only in the spring or fall. Scharf, History of Delaware, 2: 757. 8. Ibid., 866; Duc de la Rochefoucault Liancourt, Travels through the United States of North America . . . in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (London, 1800), 3: 538–39. 9. James Booth to George Read, New Castle, Apr. 24, 1789, William T. Read, Life and Correspondence of George Read. . . . (Philadelphia, 1870), 477. 10. Marquis James, Biography of a Business, 1792–1942 (Indianapolis, 1942), 53. 11. Nor was this strange, for ships bound to sea from Philadelphia really took their departure from New Castle. ‘‘When they are laden, they drop down thither with their pilot, and take in their poultry and vegetables, where the captains who remain at Philadelphia to settle their accounts at the custom-house join them by land, and from whence they sail with the first wind.’’ Rochefoucault, Travels, 3: 539. 12. Scharf, History of Delaware, 2: 894, 941; Morse, Abridgment, 94. 13. Toryism in Delaware is discussed by Harold B. Hancock in The Delaware Loyalists, Papers of the Historical Society of Delaware, New Series 3 (Wilmington, 1940). 14. Minutes of the Council of the Delaware State from 1776 to 1792 (Dover, 1886), 562–63; Delaware Archives (Wilmington, 1911–1919), 2: 920–30; Governor’s Register, State of Delaware, . . . 1674 to 1851 (Wilmington, 1926), 35; Laws of the State of Delaware (New Castle, 1797), 2: chap. 92 B, 771; John A. Munroe, ‘‘Relations between the Delaware Legislature and the Continental Congress, 1776–1789’’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Delaware, 1941), 168–71. 15. The following maps were consulted in the map collection of the Wilmington Institute Free Library: John Churchman, To the American Philosophical Society This Map of the Peninsula between Delaware and Chesapeak Bays (reprint, Washington, 1937); Delaware, engraved by A. Doolittle (New Haven, 1798); Delaware from the Best Authorities . . . , engraved for Carey’s American Edition of Guthrie’s Geography Improved, W. Barker, sculp. (Philadelphia, 1795); J. Denison, Map of the States of Maryland and Delaware (Boston, 1796); Map of the Delaware and Chesapeak Bays with the Peninsula between them, copied by Andrew Skinner, 1780, photostat from MS. map; Map of the State of Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland . . . from Actual Survey and Soundings Made in 1799, 1800 and 1801, Francis Shallus, eng. (Philadelphia, n.d.); Joseph Scott, ‘‘Map of Delaware River and Bay . . . 1795,’’ from United States Gazetteer (Philadelphia, 1795); D. F. Sotzmann, Maryland und Delaware (Hamburg, 1797); ‘‘States of Maryland and Delaware from the Latest Survey,’’ engraved for Payne’s Geography (New York, 1799).

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16. T. Rodney, Journal of a Trip to Philadelphia, Sept. 14, 1769. 17. T. Rodney, Diary, May 11, 1788, Rodney MSS. 18. Rochefoucault, Travels, 3: 487. William Cobbett spoke of the roads as being ‘‘impassable after the least rain.’’ William Reitzel, ed., The Progress of a Plough-Boy to a Seat in Parliament . . . (London, 1933), 60. Cobbett was one of the many ambitious men who moved from Delaware to Philadelphia because of the opportunities offered in America’s metropolis of the day. Ibid. 19. Harvey C. Bounds, Postal History of Delaware (Newark, 1938), 16. 20. For example, the Pennsylvania Packet for Jan. 2, 1775, carried the minutes of the committee of observation of New Castle County, a note concerning a lottery for the Newark Academy, and an offer of a reward for the return of a stolen ‘‘chestnut sorrel horse’’ to Benjamin Petterman, of Newport. The Pennsylvania Journal for Apr. 9, 1777, announced the marriage of Dr. James Wynkoop and Hetty Patterson, both of New Castle County, and advertised real estate for sale in Murderkill Hundred, Kent County, and in Newark, New Castle County. Such Delaware items seem to have been less common in Philadelphia newspapers of the 1790s, probably because Delawareans were then more easily reached by the newly established Wilmington papers. 21. Seventy-six copies of Oliver Evans’s The Young Mill-Wright & Miller’s Guide (Philadelphia, 1795) were subscribed to in Delaware before publication. Forty-one Delaware subscribers are listed in the bound volume of Carey’s American Museum for 1789 (vol. 5). 22. Dorothy Hawkins, ‘‘James Adams, the First Printer of Delaware,’’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 28 (1934): pt. 1, 29–31. 23. Ibid., 53–59. 24. Richard G. Stone, Hezekiah Niles as an Economist, in Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, ser. 51, no. 5 (Baltimore, 1933): 36. 25. Ibid., 37–38. 26. Ibid., 41. 27. Morse, Abridgment, 115. ‘‘The most notable concentration of mill industries in America was at Wilmington, where an ample and reliable water-power in the chief grain-growing district of America was united with river and ocean navigation.’’ Victor S. Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States (Washington, 1916), 1: 185. 28. Rochefoucault, Travels, 3: 530.29. Quoted in Greville Bathe and Dorothy Bathe, Oliver Evans (Philadelphia, 1935), 4. 30. Bathe and Bathe, 4. Joseph Tatnall and his son-in-law Thomas Lea were the first of the Brandywine millers to install Evans’s devices. An Isaac Lea married the daughter of Mathew Carey in 1821, in a Philadelawarean union of considerable importance. Ibid., 295. 31. The Young Mill-Wright & Miller’s Guide. 32. Bathe and Bathe, Evans, 28, 32. 33. One might note that Evans’s contemporary and rival, John Fitch, was a pioneer in a new medium of transportation between Philadelphia and Delaware, since Fitch’s steamboat made at least thirty-one trips on the Delaware in 1790, going as far north of Philadelphia as Trenton and as far south as Wilmington. Greville Bathe, ‘‘A Digest of Fitch’s Steamboats, 1786–1792,’’ An Engineer’s Miscellany (Philadelphia, 1938), 40.

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34. Among the Negroes, too, such bonds existed. For example, Lydia, a young slave girl, escaped from her master at Lewes in 1799 and was assumed to be making her way to Philadelphia, where her husband, a free Negro, lived. Wilmington, Mirror of the Times, Nov. 20, 1799. Rochefoucault wrote that ‘‘the smallness of the state, its vicinity to Philadelphia, its situation on the edge of the bay or the river Delaware, affords the Negroes very easy means of running away from their masters; which I am told they very frequently do.’’ Travels, 3: 535.15 President Washington considered calling Congress to meet in Wilmington in 1793 to escape the plague in Philadelphia. See his letter to Jefferson, Oct. 11, 1793, W. C. Ford, ed., Writings of Washington (New York, 1891), 12: 335. 36. William Spence Robertson, ed., The Diary of Francisco de Miranda, Tour of the United States, 1783–1781 (New York, 1928), 32. 37. Wilmington, Nov. 1, 1796, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, Autobiography (Dublin, 1840), 301. Three years later Rowan complained again: ‘‘Miss Vining lately forced Heloise upon me.’’ To Mrs. Rowan, Brandywine, Nov. 17, 1799, Ibid., 346. 38. J. Hugo Tatsch, Freemasonry in the Thirteen Colonies (New York, 1933), 158–66. 39. Wilmington, Delaware and Eastern Shore Advertiser, June 14, 1794. 40. Beard, American Spirit, 126–37. Coram’s book was entitled Political Inquiries to Which Is Added a Plan for the General Establishment of Schools throughout the United States (Wilmington, 1791). 41. Wilmington, Delaware and Eastern Shore Advertiser, July 2, 1794. 42. Hezekiah Niles, another ardent young Delaware Jeffersonian, was in Philadelphia in the mid-1790s. Stone, Niles, 36–37, 39. 43. J. F. Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (Princeton, 1940), 24. 44. Hilda Justice, comp., Life and Ancestry of Warner Mifflin (Philadelphia, 1905), 71–72. 45. Ibid., 223. 46. Ibid., 41–69, 102. 47. Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture (PSPA), Memoirs, 1808. 48. PSPA, Memoirs, 1811 49. PSPA, Memoirs, 1: 184–86. 50. Anna T. Lincoln, Wilmington, Delaware: Three Centuries under Four Flags (Rutland, Vt., 1937), 70–71. 51. The Philadelawarean connection is well illustrated by the life of Dr. Nathaniel Luff, as revealed in his Journal (New York, 1848). 52. William Wilson Manross, A History of the American Protestant Episcopal Church (Milwaukee, 1935), 197–98. 53. Ibid., 236. 54. James M. Buckley, History of Methodists (New York, 1898), 1: 225. 55. James L. Vallandigham and Samuel A. Gayley, History of the Presbytery of New Castle (Philadelphia, [c. 1888]), 3. 56. Ibid., 17; MSS. Records of Lewes Presbytery, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, 1: 1. 57. William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit (New York, 1858), 3: xiv. 58. Thomas Clinton Pears, Jr., ‘‘Francis Alison, Colonial Educator,’’ Delaware Notes, Seventeenth Series (Newark, 1944), 20; George H. Ryden, ‘‘The Newark Academy of Delaware in Colonial Days,’’ Pennsylvania History 2 (1935): 208–9. A

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further instance of the importance of the Philadelawarean connection is that seven of the thirteen trustees of the Newark, Delaware, Academy, as named in its charter of 1769, were then Philadelphians—William Allen, Andrew Allen, Francis Alison, John Ewing, Hugh Williamson, Charles Thomson, and James Mease. An eighth trustee, Thomas McKean, moved to Philadelphia in the next decade. Ryden, ‘‘Newark Academy,’’ 213. 59. Sprague, Annals, 3: 217. 60. Ibid., 178–80. 61. Ibid., 169–72, 600–612; Samuel Miller, ed. Medical Works of Edward Miller . . . with a Biographical Sketch (New York, 1814), xvii. 62. Henry Boehm, Reminiscences (New York, 1865), 44, 48, 88; Ezekiel Cooper, Beams of Light on Early Methodism in America (New York, 1887), 119, 233. 63. Cooper, Beams of Light, 259, 264. 64. Robert E. Pattison, ‘‘Life and Character of Richard Bassett,’’ Papers of the Historical Society of Delaware 29 (1900): 13. 65. John Lednum, History of the Rise of Methodism in America (Philadelphia, 1859), 274–75. Lednum writes that Bassett ‘‘had a tent at the first camp-meeting held on the Peninsula, in 1805, at Farson’s Hill, near Smyrna; and when Mrs. Bassett was shouting, full of the love of God, as she often was, she would as soon embrace a pious dusky daughter of Africa, in her rejoicing, as a white sister.’’ Ibid., 275. 66. James A. Bayard, the second, referred to above, was a United States senator from 1805 to 1813; Richard H. Bayard from 1836 to 1839 and from 1841 to 1845; James A. Bayard, the third, from 1851 to 1864 and from 1867 to 1869; Thomas F. Bayard, Sr., from 1869 to 1885; Thomas F. Bayard, Jr., from 1922 to 1929. 67. Richard B. Cook, The Early and Later Delaware Baptists (Philadelphia, [c. 1880]), 74–75. 68. Cook, Delaware Baptists, 59–60 ; Morgan Edwards, ‘‘History of the Baptists in Delaware,’’ Pennsylvania Magazine Of History And Biography 9 (1885): 45–46. 69. Dictionary of American Biography, (New York, 1933), 12: 622–23; Miller, Works of Edward Miller, xiv–xviii, xx, xxvii–xxviii, xxxi, lxiii, lxv–lxvi. The Rev. Samuel Miller writes that his brother, Dr. Miller, moved to Dover, Delaware, from Somerset County, Maryland, because, among other reasons, ‘‘he was anxious to be placed in a situation which admitted of more easy and convenient intercourse with Philadelphia, which, at that time, he regarded as the principal focus of medical information and improvement in the United States, and as the most convenient medium, within his reach, of communication with the European world.’’ Miller, Works of Edward Miller, xviii. ‘‘During Dr. Miller’s residence in Dover, he was in the habit of visiting Philadelphia at least once every year. To this annual visit he was induced, not only that he might enjoy the pleasure of seeing his relatives there, . . . but also that he might have an opportunity of personal and unreserved intercourse with some of the most illustrious Physicians then residing in the United States; that he might collect all the new medical and other valuable publications from abroad, which flowed into that literary emporium; and that the various articles of medical news, which his correspondents had failed of transmitting to him, might not wholly escape him.’’ Ibid., xx. 70. Burton Alva Konkle, Benjamin Chew, 1722–1810 (Philadelphia, 1932), 64. 71. McKean to J. Dickinson, Philadelphia, Dec. 25, 1780, McKean Papers (Historical Society of Pennsylvania), 1: 39; Munroe, ‘‘Delaware Legislature and Continental Congress,’’ 50–51.

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72. Will Spencer to Thomas Duff, New Castle, Oct. 1, 1764, Papers of the Read Family New Castle County, Delaware (Library of Congress, Washington). 73. Dickinson to Caesar Rodney, Philadelphia, May 10, 1779, George H. Ryden, ed., Letters to and from Caesar Rodney, I756-I784 (Philadelphia, 1933), 300–301. Yet, he added, ‘‘it is my Duty to prefer the particular Interests of the State that honours Me with her confidence & invests me with a share of her power, to the particular Interests of any other State on this Continent.’’ 74. Munroe, ‘‘Delaware Legislature and Continental Congress,’’ 190–92. 75. Ibid., 62–63.

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2 The Eve of the Revolution As soon as I had completed my doctoral dissertation in the early spring of 1947, I set about fulfilling a promise made to Professor Henry Clay Reed to write a section of narrative history for a ‘‘mug book’’ he was editing for the Lewis Historical Publishing Company. The somewhat derisive term‘‘mug book’’ referred to works sold by subscription before publication and appealing particularly to those whose ancestors were memorialized by biographies and, for a fee, portraits (thus ‘‘mugs’’). Sometimes the contents of these books were of poor quality, not conforming to the best standards of historical writing, but in this case Reed was promised full editorial control of the text of two volumes of Delaware: A History of the First State, while a third volume was devoted to the biographical sketches and likenesses that helped attract subscribers. Reed had nothing to do with the fat third volume, on which his name did not even appear. As far as I know, however, he had complete charge of the first two volumes and was able to see that some valuable articles were printed on subjects hitherto neglected. He offered to make room for my entire doctoral dissertation, but I wanted to see it published on its own and refused his wellintentioned offer. It was easy for me to write chapters on ‘‘The Eve of the Revolution’’ (reprinted here) and on ‘‘The Revolution and the Confederation’’ by recasting material in my dissertation, but a third chapter on ‘‘Party Battles, 1789– 1850’’ required new research since my dissertation closed in the year 1815. The new research introduced me to Louis McLane, whose career later absorbed my interest for years. Reed’s work appeared late in 1947. The volumes quickly became rare because a warehouse fire destroyed extra copies of the text and only the subscribed volumes were available.

IN 1765 THE THREE COUNTIES OF NEW CASTLE, KENT, AND SUSSEX LAY PLACidly beside their river. Their people, to the number of about thirty thousand, were largely occupied in farming their acres on one side 52

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of the northern part of their long, flat, southward-bearing peninsula. Delawareans lived in modest ease, with manners and customs ‘‘very simple, plain, and social.’’ ‘‘Almost every family manufactured their own clothes.’’ They ate home-produced beef, pork, poultry, wild game, butter, cheese, wheat, corn, and fruits; they drank milk, cider, small beer, and peach and apple brandy, seldom using tea, coffee, or chocolate. Honey, instead of sugar, was their usual sweetening. They had much leisure time, for even the largest farmers rarely sowed over twenty acres of wheat and thirty acres of corn. Therefore they had many social gatherings ‘‘to play and frolic, at which times the young people would dance, and the older ones wrestle, run, hop, jump, or throw the disc or play at some rustic and manly exercises. On Christmas Eve there was an universal firing of guns, and traveling round from house to house during the holiday, and indeed all winter there was a continual frolic at one house or another, shooting match, twelfth-cakes, &c.’’ ‘‘This manner of life,’’ however, according to Thomas Rodney, began to disappear during the French and Indian War when produce became more valuable. What little remained of it ‘‘was expelled by the Revolution.’’1 The change that Rodney noted in the domestic manners and customs of the people was paralleled by similar changes occurring in Delaware during the Revolutionary period in other facets of life. The developments were cumulative and gradual, rather than revolutionary and sudden, and for that reason they might easily escape notice. A glance at life in Delaware on the eve of the Revolution should then be rewarding as furnishing a frame against which the future development of the state may be measured.

The People In the years immediately preceding independence the people of Delaware were fairly evenly divided among their three counties.2 New Castle, boasting the oldest continuous white settlements, was the smallest county in area and hence the most densely populated. Sussex, on the other hand, offered many unclaimed lands and was the largest county. The southern and western part of Sussex, known as ‘‘New Sussex,’’ as well as western Kent, had long been claimed and governed by Maryland but was finally declared to be part of Del-

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aware in 1775 after a settlement of conflicting Penn and Calvert claims.3 The white people who inhabited the three counties were predominantly of British blood. The great majority were descendants of Englishmen who had come to Delaware since the conquest of the Dutch colony in 1664. Another large segment of the population was the Scotch-Irish, who invaded the Delaware River Valley in great numbers in the eighteenth century. Economic and religious discrimination impelled them to migrate from their homes in Ulster. New Castle, usually the first port entered on the Delaware River, was at first their favorite entry place, but later many came directly to Wilmington. Some set off for the frontier soon after landing, but others remained along the river, the poorest hiring out as redemptioners, or indentured servants, for three to seven years.4 Educated, ambitious, and industrious, they displayed a remarkable ‘‘spirit of independence’’ and gave a Presbyterian tint to New Castle County, which development helped to produce a cultural division between New Castle and the southern counties. The late arrival and the distinct traits of the Scotch-Irish, especially their restless striving for position, made them a challenge to the established order and won them the enmity of many of the older inhabitants.5 A small Welsh settlement had been established near Newark in 1703. Descendants of the early Swedish and Dutch settlers lingered on, but they were gradually being amalgamated into the English stock.6 The largest group after the British was the African. Most of the Negroes in Delaware were held as slaves and were subjected to treatment which varied according to the master. Dr. Nathaniel Luff declared that his father’s Negroes ‘‘were well clothed, and had no scarcity of food, and were not severely worked.’’7 On the other hand, Cuff Dix, a slave of Mark Bird, had ‘‘an iron ring in one of his ears’’ when he escaped from the New Castle County jail in 1776.8 However, sentiment against slaveholding and the slave trade was mounting. In 1767 a provision to forbid the importation of slaves was proposed in the assembly but was defeated by a vote of nine to seven.9 A similar bill was passed in 1775, but was vetoed by Governor John Penn.10 Finally this ban was secured in the constitution of 1776.11 Many manumissions were occurring, especially through the action of the Quakers, of whom Francis Asbury wrote, ‘‘the more pious part . . . are exerting themselves for the liberation of the slaves.’’12 The most prominent abolitionist in Delaware was a member of this

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faith, Warner Mifflin, a wealthy farmer who was born on the Eastern shore of Virginia but later established himself near Camden, in Kent County, where he owned about two thousand acres. Mifflin not only freed his own slaves but also did his utmost to persuade others to follow his example. It was largely due to his efforts that Kent County came to be the center in Delaware of this early abolitionist movement.13 Mifflin’s humane endeavors were strenuously opposed by those who thought that Negroes are naturally disposed to be ‘‘Hughers of Wood & drawers of Water, . . . it is Impossible for them to rise above it.’’14 An act of 1767 ordered that anyone freeing a slave must give security worth £60 against the freedman’s becoming a charge on the state. The spirit of many Delawareans is demonstrated by the preamble to this act, which stated: ‘‘It is found by experience, that free Negroes and Mulattoes are idle and slothful, and often prove burthensome to the neighbourhood wherein they live, and are of evil example to slaves.’’15 The stealing of slaves—and of horses—having ‘‘greatly increased of late years in this state,’’ a law was passed in 1779 providing a penalty of thirty-nine lashes, an hour in the pillory, and the cutting off of the soft part of one ear, plus restitution of the stolen property or four times its value in money.16 Only a small part of the people, black or white, lived in towns—a fact that held for the colonies as a whole as well as for Delaware. The population of the three counties was then larger than that of the city of Philadelphia. The largest town was Wilmington, ‘‘a pretty town,’’17 well built, ‘‘the houses being all of Brick & and very neat,’’ giving ‘‘all the appearance of one of the English county towns.’’18 In 1777 it was said to have 335 houses and 1229 inhabitants.19 Just north of Wilmington was the flour-manufacturing village of Brandywine, where there were eight mills ‘‘in a quarter of a mile, so convenient that they can take the grain out of the Vessels [directly] into the Mills.’’20 To the south and beside the river was New Castle, handicapped by having ‘‘no Wharf or Dock where Ships [could] ride out of the Strong Current,’’ yet still the county town and the assembly’s meeting place, though it had ‘‘scarcely more than a hundred houses.’’21 Newport and Christiana Bridge were principal trading and milling centers on the Christina River. Dover, the county seat of Kent, was, on the other hand, neither a port nor a manufacturing center. Cantwell’s Bridge and Duck Creek Cross Roads were trading centers between New Castle and Dover.

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In Sussex much sentiment was being expressed for a removal of the courts from Lewes to an inland and more central position. ‘‘Lewes Town,’’ one of its residents argued in its defense, ‘‘is the most Suitable place . . . in this county for the Publick buildings; we have opportunitys almost every Week for nine months of the year to send for necessaries to Philadelphia. . . . Lewes is pleasantly Situated and Esteemed a very healthy place, & the Land is good in and about the Town for five miles round.’’22 In the towns or in the countryside where most Delawareans lived, there were few organized social groups in pre-Revolutionary days. Masonic lodges were being formed at Cantwell’s Bridge, Wilmington, and Dover, which were allied to the Grand Lodge of Pennylvania.23 The churches, informal social gatherings, and the close ties of blood and conjugal relationships took the place that clubs later partially supplied. The upper class was made up of the landed gentry, the well-to-do merchants and their associates, the Anglican clergy, the physicians, and the lawyers. The ties of wealth, interest, and position that united this group were constantly being reinforced by intermarriage. The small farmer and the mechanic class formed the bulk of the population, the lower middle class, which sometimes surprised the socially prominent by the simplicity and crudeness of its life. Dr. Thomas, though ‘‘the best informed man in New Castle County’’ and a wealthy landholder, dressed like a common farmer, kept no company, ‘‘and was therefore nothing thought of.’’24 Benjamin Mifflin was a bit shocked to find his uncle living ‘‘in a Loansom Cottage a small Log House that serves for Kitchen, Parlour, Hall & Bed Chamber.’’25 Below this class were the indentured servants, usually, but not always, Scotch-Irish. The position of this class was far better than that of the slave, in spite of outward similarities. The indentured servant looked forward to attaining freedom in a fixed and certain time. Then he might migrate as he chose to any colony and thus put his past status entirely behind him. Land was cheap and most occupations were open to him. His past training might qualify him to rise especially rapidly, because in the old country he had probably received a better education than the average native of America.

The Farms The chief crops grown on the farms of the three counties were wheat, corn, barley, oats, flax, hay, and garden vegetables, such as

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potatoes, cabbage, and pulse, as well as orchard crops. Wheat, barley, and rye were sown in September; corn, in May; oats and flax, in March and April. The winter crops were harvested in June or July, bound up in sheaves, and ‘‘put into small shocks’’ in the field. Some days later, after drying, they were carted away and stacked out of doors. Wheat and barley were trod out with horses soon after harvest, while oats and rye were threshed out with a flail made of wood, leather, or iron. Corn preceded wheat and rye in the fields, some farmers planting the latter crops before the corn was gathered. The land was fallowed frequently, but fertilizer was little used, dependence being placed ‘‘on the freshness & richness’’ of the soil. The small single plow was usually the only instrument employed to break up the fields. Rust and scab, cockle, cheat, wild garlic, and worms were the chief enemies of agricultural produce. The cattle, which were small, were ‘‘bred in the greatest number on the marshes & forests of the two lower counties,’’ then driven to New Castle County, ‘‘where the most cultivated meadows’’ abounded, to be ‘‘grazed & stall-fed for the markets of Wilmington & Philadelphia.’’ In warm weather the cattle were allowed to ‘‘run at large in grazing grounds.’’ The sheep were also small and, like the cattle, were seldom sold under four years old. Horses were raised ‘‘for the road & other services,’’ but very few mules were bred in Delaware. The forests were another source of wealth, particularly those of Sussex County, where there were ‘‘immense cedar swamps of great value’’ and pines that were ‘‘admirably fitted, both in size and quality, to saw into plank & scantling.’’26 A prominent Sussex countian estimated that 300,000 staves, 800,000 cedar shingles, and 1,000,000 pine and cedar boards were exported from Indian River in his county annually from 1770 to 1774.27 Practically no quit rents had been paid in Delaware since 1713.28 Land rents were paid both in money and in kind. In spite of the existence of slave labor, much of the farm work seems to have been done by hired field hands, often Negroes, free or slave. In Kent County in 1775 they were paid about three shillings, nine pence, each for a day’s work, although the stipend varied somewhat with the nature of the task.29 Agricultural enterprise in the state was encouraged by the fact that almost every farm was within twelve miles of navigable water. Consequently every farmer could fairly easily send his produce to Philadelphia, Wilmington, or the markets on the Chesapeake. The Christina River was navigable for ships of three to four hundred tons

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and for sloops and schooners as far as Christiana Bridge. Most of the creeks opening on Delaware Bay admitted vessels of fifty to one hundred tons, and the Nanticoke and its tributaries, Broad Creek and Deep Creek, were navigable for vessels in the Chesapeake trade.30 The yearly exports from Duck Creek before the Revolution comprised about 75,000 bushels of wheat, 50,000 of corn, 2,000 of oats, 8,000 of barley, 3,000 barrels of flaxseed, 1,000 of pork, and 20,000 staves. Similar exports, though, except for staves, in smaller quantity, were shipped from such inlets as Little Creek, Jones Creek, Cedar Creek, the Mispillion, the Murderkill, the Broadkiln, and from Lewes.31 The wheat of the peninsula was of an especially soft, fine quality, favorable to the manufacture of superfine flour and therefore often commanding an enhanced price. The hard, flinty wheat of Pennsylvania and New York, could scarcely, it was said, be ground into superfine flour without an admixture of the peninsula wheat.32

The Mills The wheat, the water power, and the location of Delaware combined to encourage the development of the flour-milling industry. The earliest mills dated from the pre-English period, and throughout the eighteenth century new mills continued to be erected on the creeks of all three counties. Most of these were custom mills, grinding flour for the farmers for a fee, and as such they were a by-product of an agricultural economy rather than evidence of any imminent development of manufacturing. The growth of the famous Brandywine mills, however, was of great significance. Their beginning is usually traced from the 1740s, when Oliver Canby, a Quaker, founded a mill on the right or south bank of the Brandywine. Other mills were soon built on this side of the stream, but its full possibilities were not realized until Joseph Tatnall, another Quaker, constructed a mill race and overshot mills on the rocky north bank. Their situation was fortunate. They were close to the rich farming lands of Chester and Lancaster counties, in Pennsylvania, and also to the peninsular farms, which sent their grain in shallops up the Delaware and unloaded them right beside the mills. Eastern Shore grain similarly was shipped up the Chesapeake, hauled across the narrow neck between the Elk River and

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Brandywine Flour Mills, from an oil painting, circa 1840, by Bass Otis. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington.

Christiana Bridge, and then carried down the Christina to the Brandywine. When the grain was made into flour it was distributed easily. Philadelphia with its large West Indies trade was the leading flour market of the colonies, and Philadelphia was as convenient to the mills as were the wheat fields of Lancaster or Kent. Consequently ‘‘the most notable concentration of mill industries in the colonies’’ arose on the Brandywine.33 These enterprises were merchant mills, in contradistinction to the earlier custom mills, for the Brandywine millers bought the grain and marketed the flour. Tatnall was the first important industrialist in Delaware and entered many other business activities, becoming the first president of the Bank of Delaware and of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Company.34 Another local industry that was closely allied to farming was shipbuilding, for vessels were necessary, in view of the poor state of colonial roads, to transport the agricultural surplus to market. ‘‘Seagoing craft were built on almost every stream flowing into Delaware River and Delaware Bay.’’35 But since the Delaware creeks were

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shallow, few ships of size needed to be constructed in the lower counties. Iron making was another colonial industry of Delaware, and it too was necessary to the dominant agrarian culture, for horseshoes, tools, nails, and the like. After some early ventures in New Castle County had failed because of ‘‘a scarcity of good ores and difficulties in financing,’’36 Sussex County became the local center of this business. The Deep Creek Furnace and Nanticoke Forge was established in 1764, and a stone wharf was built on the Nanticoke River to permit the transportation of the product by water. Another early Sussex ironworks was the Pine Grove Furnace, erected at the site of the town of Concord by a group of Philadelphia and New York merchants. These enterprises apparently flourished until the Revolution, when British ships made the Chesapeake, into which the Nanticoke flows, unsafe for commerce.37 Tanning was still another industry that was connected with the predominant agrarian economy of colonial Delaware. The proximity of clear water, of supplies of black-oak bark, and of grazing grounds for cattle helped to establish this industry here.38 Salt works, potteries, and distilleries were among the other manufactories established in colonial times. The products of Delaware manufacturers, like those of Delaware farmers, were usually taken to market by water. Roads existed but they were notoriously bad, fitted rather for the horseback rider than for the loaded wagon. ‘‘The Roads being bad we Came Sloe,’’39 was an expression that typified a constant complaint. Francis Asbury told of being forced to get out of his carriage and walk.40 Bridges and mill dams frequently offered unusual hazards to the traveler, while complaints were often made of the inadequacy of the ferries.41 The two chief reasons for the poor state of the roads were the availability of cheaper water routes and the lack of any large communities between which a fast land transport might have been desired. New Castle County, however, did lie on the direct line between Philadelphia and Baltimore. On this route too, waterways were used as far as possible, and to connect them a line of stages was established between New Castle and the Elk River in 1775.42 A year earlier, Samuel Bush, who had commanded a brig in the West Indies trade, brought a sloop of about thirty tons and inaugurated a weekly service between Wilmington and Philadelphia. Wilmington, and New Castle as well, had also developed an ocean trade, along the coast and with the British Isles, southern Europe, Madeira,

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and especially the West Indies. They exported mainly flour, corn meal, and lumber, of the produce of the region, and imported coffee, molasses, wine, cotton, hides, limes, rum, sugar, and salt, as well as immigrants and coins.43 A lighthouse to aid ships entering the Delaware capes had been erected in 1764 with money raised by lotteries.44 Before the Revolution Delaware perpetually suffered from a lack of currency with which to carry on business. This lack was largely due to ‘‘the frequent remittances . . . to Great Britain in discharge of the debts accrued by the importation of manufactures and merchandise from thence.’’45 To remedy this situation the government of the three counties began to issue paper money in April 1723. For the most part the Delaware bills of credit were secured by first mortgages on real estate made through loan offices in each county, new currency being issued to the mortgagees. They paid interest on their loans, and the interest payments helped to support the government. Some issues were retired by excise or property taxes. An issue of £30,000, equally divided among the counties, was authorized by the assembly in 1775.46

The Churches There was no established church in colonial Delaware.47 Penn’s charter of 1701 guaranteed freedom of worship to every monotheist and the right to hold office to every Christian. Later the assembly required its members to take an oath specifically denying the Roman Catholic faith.48 This intolerant measure affected very few people, however, for there were in Delaware but a handful of Catholics, who were occasionally ministered to by priests coming from Maryland.49 The most numerous sect in colonial Delaware was the Church of England, which was particularly strong in Kent and Sussex. Most of its adherents, however, could not enjoy the regular services of their church, because it was not able to secure a sufficient number of ministers for its American missions. The lack of a bishop in America made it necessary to secure ordained clergy from England, but few priests who could secure a living at home were willing to emigrate, and the expense and trouble of an ocean voyage hindered the missions from producing their own ministry. The lack of a bishop also prevented the admission of new communicants to the church.50

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The small number of Anglican missionaries in Delaware made it necessary for each clergyman to assume responsibility for an area larger than he could possibly cover. For a long time there was but one in each county, with the result that only a very small number of people could be reached on any one Sunday.51 In 1776 there were five Anglican missionaries in Delaware— Aeneas Ross at New Castle, Philip Reading in Appoquinimink Hundred, Samuel Magaw at Dover, Sydenham Thorne near Milford, and Samuel Tingley at Lewes. They were supported in part by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Anglican missionary society, supplemented by such assistance as their parishioners chose to give. After 1765 every congregation was ordered to provide a glebe farm for the support of its minister, who often added to his income by teaching.52 The only religious group that rivaled the Anglicans in popularity in pre-Revolutionary Delaware was the Presbyterians, whose strength was centered in New Castle County, where the Scotch-Irish entered Delaware. The presbytery of New Castle, with jurisdiction over Delaware and parts of Pennsylvania and Maryland, had been organized in 1717. A division of the presbytery had taken place in 1735, resulting in the establishment of the presbytery of Lewes, which included the churches of this denomination in Kent and Sussex and in several counties of the Maryland Eastern Shore. After about seven years these two presbyteries were again joined, but in 1758 they separated once more.53 Like the Anglicans, the Presbyterian clergy often were expected to cover impossible distances and to divide their time among several churches.54 ‘‘Here are Numbers of starving Souls crying to us for the Bread of Life,’’ pleaded the Lewes Presbytery in 1773, ‘‘and we are unable to assist them.’’55 The lack of ministers was due to the low salaries offered them—for instance, £9 a year. Some farmed on the side; others practiced medicine or taught school. The Presbyterians, however, licensed their clergy through the local presbytery and thus were freed of the hindrance to a supply of clergy that the expense and danger of an ocean voyage were to the Anglicans. A strict insistence was nevertheless placed on an adequate education as a preparation for the ministry, and to that end the ‘‘log College’’ in Pennsylvania, Princeton, and the academy founded by Francis Alison at New London, but soon moved to Newark, were established. The Society of Friends were a more important group than their

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numbers indicated. They were most numerous in Wilmington and Brandywine, for the development of which they were largely responsible, and to the northwest and in Kent County, particularly in the neighborhood of Duck Creek. Avoiding many of the political arguments of the day, they mended their own fences, expelling slaveholding from their society; promoting temperance; urging plainness of speech, behavior, dress, and furnishings; and inquiring closely into the morals of their youth.56 While the Quakers marked time, the Baptists in Delaware were actively proselyting. Their oldest church was that at the Welsh Tract, near Newark, founded by a group of Welshmen who came from Pembroke and Carmarthen counties via Pennsylvania. This church ‘‘was the principal, if not sole means of introducing singing, imposition of hands, ruling elders, and church covenants into the Middle States,’’ a member claimed.57 Welsh Tract was the mother church for most of the other Baptist churches that appeared in New Castle and Kent counties before the Revolution. Later this faith was brought to Sussex County by missionaries from Virginia.58 The most noted Baptist preacher in Delaware was Morgan Edwards, Welsh-born, Anglican-reared historian of the church and a founder of Brown University. He purchased a farm near the Welsh Tract Church in 1772 and lived in Delaware for the rest of his life.59 In Wilmington a Swedish Lutheran church carried on the worship known to the first settlers there, though the English language was replacing the vanishing Swedish tongue. In western Kent existed an unusual religious group, called the Nicholites, being ‘‘sprung from one Nicols, a visionary.’’ They were plainer than the Friends, whom many of them later joined, and condemned all ostentation, all that was unnatural, even dyed cloth.60 A most significant religious movement was just getting under way in Delaware in the years immediately prior to the Revolution. Shortly before 1770 Robert Strawbridge, an Ulsterman and an independent itinerant, and Captain Thomas Webb, a one-eyed veteran of the British army, introduced Methodism to Delaware, and in 1772 Francis Asbury, the greatest of the Methodist evangelists, appeared here, having been sent to the New World by John Wesley, founder of this sect.61 Asbury had a cold reception in Wilmington and New Castle. In the former place ‘‘there were but few to hear’’; in the latter he ‘‘met with opposition and found the Methodists had done no great good.’’ The people in these towns seemed ‘‘devoted to pride, vanity, and folly’’; a tavern keeper who received him ‘‘lost his com-

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pany’’ for doing so.62 The Methodists met with a more cordial reception downstate, where Asbury often found the congregations ‘‘attentive and affected,’’ though ‘‘rude and unpolished.’’ His spirit, he declared, was ‘‘at liberty in preaching to those untaught people, who behaved with seriousness and attention,’’ and he hoped that ‘‘as the gospel of Jesus Christ meets with indulgence . . . it will prove a general blessing, and that Delaware will become as the garden of the Lord, filled with plants of his own planting.’’63 The great success of the Methodists came later, during the Revolution and after, when their enthusiastic preachers reached the farmers of rural Delaware, hitherto unministered to. This success was partially due to the fact that in the early days the Methodists worked not against the Anglican clergy, but with them. Many of the Anglican ministers, unable themselves to reach all of their people on the peninsula, cooperated with Asbury, who, in turn, refused to administer the sacraments and with his followers resorted to the church of England for communion.64

Education Illiteracy was widespread in the three counties on the eve of the Revolution. There were no publicly supported schools. Traditionally, education was in the hands of the church, but the clergy were so few in numbers that no church-sponsored education system could be established on a large scale. The Anglican missionaries, who had small parish libraries and distributed religious tracts, added to their scanty income by teaching.65 The Friends in the 1740s opened a school in Wilmington, where boys and girls were taught in separate departments. It is likely that they also had a school at Duck Creek and perhaps one or more elsewhere before the Revolution.66 A Presbyterian, the Reverend Francis Alison, founded an academy at New London, Pennsylvania, which was moved first to Cecil County, Maryland, and then (1765 or before) to Newark, Delaware, by the Reverend Alexander McDowell. It was chartered as the Newark Academy, a nonsectarian institution, in 1769.67 The Reverend Matthew Wilson, who had studied with Alison and taught in his academy, later conducted a school at Lewes.68 In 1773, the presbytery of New Castle agreed to help ‘‘poor & pious youths’’ gain an education ‘‘when any such’’ appeared ‘‘to need . . . Assistance.’’69

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Presbyterian laymen, unsupported by the church, were also important in the history of Delaware education, for the Scotch-Irish immigrant was usually well educated. Sometimes indentured servants were used as tutors. ‘‘Let us go & buy a School Master,’’ the planters were reported to have said when they saw an immigrant ship coming up the river. Often a teacher, hired by the year, was boarded round among neighboring farmers. ‘‘The office & character of such a person is very mean & contemptible here,’’ wrote the Reverend George Ross, ‘‘& it cannot be other ways, ‘til the public takes the Education of Children into their mature consideration.’’70 Many teachers set up their own schools. John Filson, who later won fame as a Kentucky surveyor, had an elementary school in Wilmington. John Thelwell, who added to his income by holding innumerable town offices, taught in Wilmington for half a century. The British Horn Book, Dilworth’s speller, Gough’s arithmetic, and the Bible were his texts; a prayer and a hymn (he became a devout Methodist) were his opening exercises. ‘‘The rattan or the ferule seemed to be in perpetual motion, and were as common in his seminary as gymnastics are at this day.’’71 The most pretentious school in Wilmington was the Wilmington Academy, built in 1765 and said to have been chartered as a public school in 1773. Lawrence Girelius, pastor of the Lutheran church, was the first president of its board of trustees.72 A part of the market square at New Castle was set aside by the assembly in 1772 for the erection of a schoolhouse.73 A schoolhouse was erected at Christiana Bridge in 1769 at a cost of more than one hundred pounds.74 A grammar school existed at the head of Bohemia River, on the Maryland line, in 1775.75 Some similar schools existed farther down the state, although as late as 1768 there was not a grammar school in Sussex and rare was the man who could ‘‘write a tolerable hand or spell with propriety the most common words.’’ A schoolhouse had been built in Lewes, but several attempts to establish a Latin school had failed because of the ‘‘extreme poverty’’ of the people.76 The most important preparatory school was the Newark Academy, which, in 1768, had sixty boys under the care of a rector and two assistants, who taught ‘‘the Languages, . . . Arithmetick, Euclid’s Elements, . . . Practical branches of the Mathematicks, & Logick.’’ The students paid £10 to £15 a year for lodging and £3 10s. for tuition.77 Primarily because of its early Presbyterian connection, the academy drew students from a considerable distance. Of nine graduates in 1775, four came from Delaware, two from Virginia, two from

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North Carolina, and one from Pennsylvania.78 Funds were raised for it in other colonies, in Great Britain, and in the West Indies.79 The Newark Academy probably offered far better instruction than most of the schools of Delaware. Christiana Bridge sought to replace its teacher ‘‘on account of his Irregular Conduct.’’80 After studying Latin for two years in Dover, Nathaniel Luff had to begin the language all over again when he went to Philadelphia; he did not even know the meaning of ‘‘parsing.’’ In Dover, he complained, ‘‘a few men anxious for the promotion of their children were excessively gulled by tutors—themselves unacquainted with the learned languages and sciences.’’81 For this reason, many men went out of Delaware to school. Of the professions, members of the clergy received the longest academic training. As their vocation was an itinerant one, comparatively few of them were born and reared in Delaware. Law students read law in a lawyer’s office, frequently out of the colony and much more rarely—John Dickinson and Benjamin Chew are two examples—in London. Physicians received their professional training by apprenticing themselves to older doctors or by studying at the College of Philadelphia or at Edinburgh.82 No newspapers are known to have been printed in Delaware before the Revolution. There was but one printing press in the three counties. It was kept by James Adams, a Scotch-Irishman who had come to Philadelphia before 1753 and worked there for Franklin and Hall. He set up in business for himself in Philadelphia about 1760, but apparently to avoid competition moved to Wilmington in 1761. Here he printed laws and other government materials, almanacs, religious works, and educational books.83 Delawareans customarily read Philadelphia newspapers and advertised in them; the assembly recognized their availability by ordering notices to be placed in them.84 No work of literary value is known to have been produced in Delaware in the immediately pre-Revolutionary period. Better things were read than written, for Thomas Rodney told of reading Plutarch, Dryden, and a life of Peter the Great in September 1769.85 Drama made at least one appearance in Delaware, for Asbury wrote, May 21, 1774, ‘‘At Newcastle on Saturday, Satan was there, diverting the people by a play.’’86

Notes 1. Undated letter of Thomas Rodney in Proceedings on Unveiling the Monument to Caesar Rodney and the Oration . . . by Thomas F. Bayard at Dover . . . (Wilmington, 1889), 20–21.

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2. S. H. Sutherland, Population Distribution in Colonial America (New York, 1936), 124, 135; E. B. Greene and V. D. Harrington, American Population before the Census of 1790 (New York, 1932), 121. 3. Laws of Delaware, 1: 567–71; Conrad, History of Delaware, 2: 683–84. 4. Sutherland, Population Distribution, 138, 141, 150; Elizabeth Montgomery, Reminiscences of Wilmington (Philadelphia, 1851), 163. 5. Montgomery, loc. cit.; J. D. Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 1783–1784 (Philadelphia, 1911), 1: 339. 6. American Council of Learned Societies, ‘‘Report on the Committee on Linguistic and National Stocks in the Population of the United State,’’ Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1931, vol. 1 (Washington, 1932), 121– 22, 393. 7. Journal of the Life of Nathaniel Luff, M. D. of the State of Delaware (New York, 1848), 9–10. 8. Pennsylvania Gazette, Oct. 16, 1776. 9. Caesar Rodney, Charles Ridgely, and Thomas Collins supported it. Minutes of the House of Representatives, 1765–1770 (1931 edition), 127–28. 10. H. C. Reed, ‘‘The Delaware Constitution of 1776,’’ Delaware Notes, sixth series (Newark, 1930), 30–31. 11. Article 26. 12. Journal of Rev. Francis Asbury (New York, 1852), 1: 280. 13. Hilda Justice, ed., Life and Ancestry of Warner Mifflin, Friend—Philanthropist— Patriot (Philadelphia, 1905), contains much material on Mifflin, including a biographical sketch, an autobiographical note, and lists of manumissions. See also petition of Mifflin’s heirs, 1809, Legislative Papers (Delaware State Archives). 14. Thomas Rodney, essay on Negroes, undated MS., Brown Collection (Historical Society of Delaware). 15. Laws, 1: 435–37. Cf. H. B. Stewart, The Negro in Delaware to 1829 (unpublished M. A. thesis, University of Delaware, 1940), and C. S. Shorter, Slavery in Delaware (unpublished M. A. thesis, Howard University, 1934.) 16. Laws, 2: 667–68. 17. The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell (New York, 1924), 160. 18. Philip Padelford, ed., Colonial Panorama, 1775; Dr. Robert Honyman’s Journal for March and April (San Marino, Calif., 1939), 11. 19. Lincoln, Wilmington, 96. 20. Cresswell, Journal, 160. 21. E. H. Tatum, Jr., ed., The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, Secretary to Lord Howe, 1776–1778 (San Marino, 1940), 257; Andrew Burnaby, Burnaby’s Travels through North America (New York, 1904), 87. 22. John Rodney to Caesar Rodney, Lewes, Mar. 3, 1779, Ryden, Rodney Letters, 33. 23. Conrad, History of Delaware, 2: 437–38; J. H. Tatsch, Freemasonry in the Thirteen Colonies (New York, 1933), 158–66. 24. T. Rodney, Journal, Oct. 25, 1790, Brown Collection. 25. V. H. Paltsits, ed., Journal of Benjamin Mifflin, . . . 1762 (New York, 1935), 16. 26. R. O. Bausman and J. A. Munroe, eds., ‘‘James Tilton’s Notes on the Agriculture of Delaware in 1788,’’ Agricultural History, 20: 176–87. 27. Thomas Robinson to Robert Alexander, May 11, 1780, Chalmers MSS. Philadelphia, vol. 2. (New York Public Library). 28. R. S. Rodney, ‘‘The End of the Penns’ Claims to Delaware, 1789–1814; Some

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Forgotten Lawsuits,’’ Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (April 1937), 188. 29. T. Rodney, An Acct. of Harvest Wages, 1775 , Brown Collection. 30. Delaware Register, 1: 112. 31. Thomas Robinson to Robert Alexander, May 11, 1780, Chalmers MSS., Philadelphia, vol. 2. 32. See Tilton’s Notes, loc. cit. 33. V. S. Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States, vol. 1 (New York, 1929), 185. 34. Scharf, History of Delaware, 2: 734–735. 35. Sutherland, Population Distribution, 165. 36. A. C. Bining, Pennsylvania Iron Manufacture in the Eighteenth Century (Harrisburg, 1938), 53, 187. 37. Conrad, History of Delaware, 2: 702, 737 38. Corbit, Higgins, Spruance Papers and John Ferris Papers. (Historical Society of Delaware). 39. T. Rodney, Journal, Jan. 29, 1770, Rodney Collection. 40. Asbury, Journal, 1: 353, 355. 41. T. Rodney, Journal, Sept. 14, 1769, Rodney Collection; H. D. Farish, ed., Journal & Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773–1774 (Williamburg, 1943), 132–33, 144. 42. Conrad, History of Delaware, 2: 516. 43. Sutherland, Population Disstribution, 276–78; account between Thomas Wiley and John Ferris, St. Eustatius, Jan. 31, 1770, Ferris Papers. 44. A. E. S. Hall, Report of Condition of Henlopen Lighthouse, Sept. 17, 1925 (typescript in Historical Society of Delaware). 45. Laws, 1: 571–86. 46. R. S. Rodney, Colonial Finances in Delaware (Wilmington, 1928), 14–16, 18, 27–28. 47. See also the section on religious history in the second volume of this work. 48. See the following chapter, note 3. 49. N. W. Rightmyer, ‘‘The Church of England in the Three Lower Counties and the Delaware State,’’ (unpublished Ed. D. thesis, Temple University, 1945), 59. 50. Ibid., 229. 51. See letters of Charles Inglis, Samuel Magaw, and Samuel Tingley in W. S. Perry, ed., Historical Collections relating to the American Colonial Church 5(1878): 118, 124, 125, 127, 137. 52. Rightmyer, ‘‘Church of England in Lower Counties,’’ 216–22. 53. J. L. Vallandigham and S. A. Gayley, History of the Presbytery of New Castle (Philadelphia, c. 1888), 17–18; Records of the Lewes Presbytery, MS. (Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia), I, 1. A general reference for this section is Elizabeth Waterston, Churches in Delaware during the Revolution (Wilmington, 1925). 54. Records of the Presbytery of New Castle upon Delaware, MS. (Presbyterian Historical Society), 3: 354, 361. 55. Records of Lewes Presbytery, I, 95–96. 56. R. M. Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies (London, 1923), 524, 565–74. 57. Morgan Edwards, ‘‘History of the Baptists in Delaware,’’ Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 9: 52.

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58. Ibid., 51, 60–61. 59. Ibid., 45–46. 60. Asbury, Journal, 1: 344, 350. 61. J. M. Buckley, A History of Methodism in the United States (New York, 1898), 1: 136; Rightmyer, ‘‘Church of England in Lower Counties,’’ 188; W. W. Sweet, Methodism in American History (New York, c. 1933), 52, 57. 62. Asbury, Journal, I, 27–28, 81, 112. 63. Ibid., 280–286, 292. 64. Ibid, 307–8, 333; Rightmyer, ‘‘Church of England in Lower Counties,’’ 189. 65. Rightmyer, op. cit., 258, 270–71; Luff, Journal, 3. 66. W. C. Dunlap, Quaker Education in Baltimore and Virginia Yearly Meetings with an Account of Certain Meetings of Delaware and the Eastern Shore (Philadelphia, 1936), 250 ff., 310–12; L. P. Powell, The History of Education in Delaware (Washington, 1893), 43. 67. A Brief History of the University of Delaware (Newark, 1940), 6. See G. H. Ryden, ‘‘The Relation of the Newark Academy of Delaware to the Presbyterian Church and to Higher Education in the American Colonies,’’ Delaware Notes, 9th series (Newark, 1935), 7–42. 68. Delaware Gazette, Apr. 17, 1790; Delaware Register, 2: 192. 69. Records of New Castle Presbytery, 3: 347. 70. Perry, Collections, 5: 47. 71. John Hamilton ‘‘Some Reminiscences of Wilm’t’n and My Youthful Days,’’ Delaware History, 1: (Wilmington, 1946), 89–98; Montgomery, Reminiscences, 227–29. 72. Montgomery, Reminiscences, 293–95. 73. Laws, 1: 516–17. 74. Memorandum in folder, ‘‘Delaware Schools’’ (Historical Society of Delaware). 75. Samuel Miller, Memoirs of the Rev. John Rodgers, D. D. (New York, 1813), 96. 76. John Andrews to S. P. G., Aug. 4, 1768, Perry, Historical Collections, 2: 430. 77. Francis Alison to Ezra Stiles, Philadelphia, May 7, 1768, F. B. Dexter, ed., Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles (New Haven, 1916), 433. 78. Pennsylvania Gazette, Oct. 11, 1775. 79. Petition of Newark Academy Trustees, January, 1781 (University of Delaware). 80. Resolution, Dec. 18, 1782, folder, ‘‘Delaware Schools’’ (Historical Society of Delaware). 81. Luff, Journal, 5–7. 82. See the sketches of physicians and lawyers in Scharf, History of Delaware, 1: 470–610. 83. Dorothy Hawkins, ‘‘James Adams, the First Printer of Delaware,’’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 28 (1934), pt. 1, pp. 29–30; Dorothy Hawkins, A Checklist of Delaware Imprints up to and including 1800 (M. S. thesis, Columbia University, 1928), typescript in Wilmington Institute Free Library. 84. House Minutes, Oct. 26, 1768, 164–165 85. T. Rodney, Journal, Rodney Collection. 86. Asbury, Journal, 1: 112.

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3 The New Castle Tercentenary On June 1, 1951, the Library of Congress celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of New Castle by a ceremony marking the opening of an exhibit of rare books, maps, manuscripts, pictures, and other materials relating to ‘‘Old New Castle and Modern Delaware,’’ as this exhibition was entitled. With Senator J. Allen Frear presiding, I was called on for an historic address, which was printed in a catalog of this exhibition.

WE DELAWAREANS ARE GRATEFUL THAT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS seen fit to honor our state with this exhibit dedicated to ‘‘Old New Castle and Modern Delaware.’’ The occasion that this exhibit commemorates is the three hundredth anniversary of the founding by Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch of a military outpost named Fort Casimir, which became successively known as Fort Trinity, New Amstel, and New Castle. The people of the state that is honored with New Castle tonight hope that they are not given to expansive claims. The small size of their state—Maryland’s ‘‘little Crooked Neighbour,’’ as a New Hampshire congressman once called it—its lack of any western domains, the regularity of its topography, the median nature of its geographic setting between Maine and Florida, Boston and Charleston, have induced in its folk an abhorrence of extremes, a love of quiet stability, of sweet moderacy, an attitude expressed in John M. Clayton’s political dictum, in medio tutissimus—the middle way is the safest. To phrase the argument another way, I use the words of my colleague, Augustus Able. ‘‘The land of Delaware is green,’’ he writes, ‘‘the air moist. Most of us crackle with electricity only at rare moments. And although we speak of Delaware ‘under four flags,’ it has been a land of peace rather than of war. Prosperity has been fairly continuous, certainly unchecked by great natural disaster. There has been hard work done, but not too hard, not to heartbreak and mad70

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ness. Law and order and elements of graciousness, for some at least, have long been present.’’ With a level landscape and a stable (not static) society, the Delawarean has trimmed his tastes to fit his environment. A pleasant glade, a stream meandering through meadows, these are the small scenes he has learned to love rather than grander and more striking vistas that his land does not afford. Delawareans being thus given to meticulous discrimination rather than to transcendental views, it is proper to state first what the settlement of New Castle was not, before stating what it was, what it did mean.

I New Castle was by no means the first settlement on the Delaware. A fort, intermittently occupied by the Dutch, had been established on the Jersey shore of the Delaware, near Gloucester, as early as 1623. Nor was it the first Dutch settlement in the state of Delaware. An attempt had been made to settle a Dutch colony called Swanendael near Lewes in 1631, but the settlement was destroyed by the Indians. This colonizing venture was, however, of greater importance to Delawareans than its temporary nature would indicate, for it proved, years later, to be the chief evidence in defeating the attempt of the Calverts to claim Delaware as part of their Maryland colony. Nor was New Castle the first permanent settlement in Delaware or on the river. The first permanent settlement was made near what is now Wilmington by the Swedes in 1638. The Swedish hamlet at Fort Christina was not included in the early site of Wilmington laid out in 1731 and was not taken into the city for many years. New Sweden expanded up the river into Pennsylvania and across the river into New Jersey and had been in existence, if not flourishing, for thirteen years when the Dutch came to New Castle. What, then, was New Castle? What significance does its settlement have in the history of Delaware and of the United States? It was the capital of Delaware from shortly after its foundation until the Revolutionary War. For a shorter time it was the political center of the Delaware River Valley, of the earliest settlements in Pennsylvania and West Jersey as well as in Delaware. More than this, New Castle was the first city in the Delaware River

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Valley. Near Wilmington and elsewhere settlements were established earlier, but they were agricultural hamlets, forts in the wilderness, when New Castle became a cosmopolitan town, a small town, indeed, but a cosmopolitan one. Before Philadelphia was conceived of, New Castle was the economic center of the river. And since this was in the seventeenth century, the ‘‘deep-water period’’ of American settlement, rivers were then of vastly greater significance to American life than they are today. Furthermore, since the river on which New Castle was founded became a geographic center of colonial American civilization, since its valley became the middle region of the Middle Atlantic states; since on its shores grew Philadelphia, the largest city in America by the time of the Revolution, the settlement at New Castle, which is important in the history of the Delaware Valley, is consequently of significance to the whole story of the rise of American civilization. In celebrating the tercentenary of the founding of New Castle, Delaware has chosen to celebrate at the same time the founders, the Dutch, and so the commemoration is officially denoted the Dutch Tercentenary. In this way, besides noting the settlement of New Castle, Delaware seeks to honor the larger part the Dutch played in the establishment of the state. It was a Dutch expedition, though commanded by English Henry Hudson in his Half Moon, that first called the attention of Europe to the economic possibilities of the Delaware River. Thereafter Dutch traders frequented the Delaware, which became the South River of their American domains, as the Hudson was their North River. The significance of their brief settlement at Swanendael in separating the Delaware counties from Maryland has already been mentioned. The New Sweden colony, planted in 1638, owed its inspiration to the Dutch, especially to William Usselinx, Samuel Blommaert, and Peter Spiring, and the direction of its settlement was given by Peter Minuit, who had earlier been Director of the New Netherland. Besides inspiration and direction, part of the money, trade goods, and personnel for the first Swedish expedition was supplied from the Netherlands. The importance of the Dutch to Delaware is not wholly to be told in terms of settlements made and Maryland claims averted. The Dutch also brought a measure of republicanism to Delaware and the valley, and they introduced local elections to a fringe of Europe that had known only Swedish autocracy. They brought also a Calvinist faith, which, when strengthened in the next century by Presbyterian

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immigrants from Scotland and Ireland, was to color strongly the cultural heritage of the valley and to further especially the development of educational institutions therein. And in themselves alone, and the various peoples who came with them, the French Bayards, for example, and the Bohemian, Augustine Herrman, as well as English and Flemings, they added to the demographic variety of a valley which became one of the most diversely populated areas of colonial America. So, in a fashion, the New Castle tercentenary is a celebration of an ancient and continuing American institution, that mingling of peoples that has caused our country to be termed a melting pot.

II Much having been said of the significance of the Dutch foundation of New Castle, a word is in order as to the why and wherefore of that settlement. The Dutch, of course, regarded the Swedish settlement on the Delaware as an unwarranted trespass upon their property. Their claim they traced to Hudson’s voyage, to subsequent mercantile ventures on the Delaware, to purchases from the Indians, and to settlements, all temporary, at Fort Nassau, Swanendael, and elsewhere. To exploit this and other claims in America, a Dutch West India Company had been chartered and had planted, in the 1620s, permanent settlements on the Hudson, and ruled its North American domains, the Delaware and Hudson Valleys, through a director stationed at New Amsterdam, now New York. Dissatisfied members of this West India Company, unable to break its monopoly of the Dutch American trade, had appealed to the Swedes for protection and aid in an American venture, a venture which had resulted in New Sweden on the Delaware. For more than a decade after 1638, when the Swedes appeared on the Delaware, the Dutch had contented themselves with protests, their actions being so limited not only by the weakness of their colony on the Hudson, by Indian troubles, by English pretensions, and by preoccupation with colonial ventures elsewhere, as in the Caribbean islands and South America, but also by the interdependence of Dutch and Swedes in Europe, where the Thirty Years’ War was raging. In 1651, however, Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch director of the New Netherland, determined upon a shrewd course of action to preserve Dutch rights and strengthen the strategic position of the Dutch on

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the Delaware. Eleven Dutch ships were dispatched from New Amsterdam around New Jersey to Fort Nassau. Here the fleet was met by an army of 120 men that Stuyvesant marched across Jersey. After verbal agreements with Indian sachems, the Dutch garrison and guns from Fort Nassau were transported to Sand Hook, five miles below the estuary of the Christina River, where the Swedes had settled. Here at Sand Hook in July 1651, Fort Casimir was built on land then the west shore of the Delaware, now sunk under the river near the New Castle ferry pier. The name was taken from a distinguished family of Stuyvesant’s native Friesland. The Swedes were powerless to do more than protest. If a sufficient armed force could be kept at Fort Casimir, the Dutch would hold New Sweden in a vise. The Swedish settlements were up river, above Fort Casimir. The one Swedish settlement that had been made downstream, Fort Elfsborg, a few miles below on the Jersey shore, had been abandoned by its feeble garrison because of the annoyance experienced from insects. Apparently the New Jersey mosquito even then was a marauder on the Delaware. His colony strategically severed from the sea across which his lines of communication stretched to Scandinavia, his subjects restless, even mutinous, in the face of what they conceived to be executive tyranny, his outposts neglected by a homeland from which no ships had arrived since 1648, the Swedish governor, Johan Printz, determined that personal intercession was necessary at the Swedish court if New Sweden was to be saved. Consequently he first sent his son, then went himself, in 1653, to his native Sweden. But the Swedes were already taking action. An expedition at last left Sweden early in 1654 and proceeded to the Delaware under the command of Johan Rising, a scholar and government official. Upon his arrival in America, Rising found Dutch Fort Casimir powderless, in no condition to defy him. Contrary to his orders, which were to expel the Dutch from the river by persuasion if he could, but without hostility, Rising called on the Dutch garrison to surrender, letting a couple of shots be fired from the heaviest guns of his ship to reinforce the logic of his request. Persuasion it was, but hardly without hostility. The feeble Dutch garrison forthwith surrendered, but the fort was not abandoned. The twenty-odd Dutch families at New Castle were encouraged to remain; the fort was strengthened and was renamed Fort Trinity, for the Sunday on which it was taken. Thus, in 1654,

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New Castle had achieved the second of the four names it was to bear and recognized the second of the four nations that were to rule it.

III But retribution for his daring was not long in coming to Rising. The Delaware settlements, Swedish and Dutch, like most colonial foundations elsewhere, were so weak both in manpower and in armament that they were wholly unable to drive off a well-supplied European expedition. Naval power, in those years, reigned supreme on the Delaware. The valley was there for the taking by any European nation with the will to take it. The Dutch now had the will. Their peaceful maneuverings against the Swedes on the Delaware were at an end. It was the Swedes, through Rising, who had opened hostilities. The Dutch would end them. In September 1655, therefore, a Dutch fleet of seven vessels bearing 317 soldiers appeared off New Castle, landed men north of the fort, thus separating it from the rest of New Sweden, and called upon its commander to surrender. Recognizing the impossibility of successful defense, he and his troops capitulated, and New Castle was Dutch once more. But the Dutch did not stop here. Stuyvesant moved his forces north to the Christina and drew siege lines close to the little fort on that river, where Rising commanded. Having lost a good part of his scanty garrison and supplies at New Castle, Rising felt his position was hopeless and berated his subordinate at New Castle for doing what he was about to do, yielding without battle to a superior force. With Rising’s capitulation, all New Sweden came into Dutch hands. The Swedish dominion on the Delaware was at an end forever; the Delaware was now reunited with the Hudson as the New Netherland colony of the Dutch West India Company.

IV New Castle’s day of glory was at hand. The Dutch settlement was no longer merely a strategic fortification in a colonial contest; it was now the political capital of a river empire. The empire was weak and sparsely populated to be sure, but its future possibilities were recog-

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nized by Dutchmen, and by others as well. Two decades earlier an English merchant, Thomas Yong, had paid the Delaware one of its earliest, and most frequently quoted, compliments: ‘‘I am confident,‘‘ Yong had written in 1634, ‘‘that this River is the most healthfull, fruitfull and commodious River in all the North of America, to be planted.’’ It was an empire, too, that was politically subordinate to the Hudson Valley, but geographic conditions made necessary some political separation. For this reason, Stuyvesant sent to Fort Casimir a vicedirector, Jean Paul Jacquet, an official who would represent the director on the Delaware and settle such local problems as need not, or could not, be carried to New Amsterdam. Soon, however, New Castle’s dominion was restricted. To settle a debt, the directors of the West India Company in 1657 transferred the land below the Christina, which included Fort Casimir, to the municipal corporation of Amsterdam—the Dutch city on the Amstel, not New Amsterdam on the Hudson. The new proprietors sent a director, Jacob Alrichs, as well as many colonists, to Fort Casimir, and they established a partially elective government for the community, hereafter called New Amstel, which had been growing around the fort. New Castle thus acquired its third name, while losing a geographic part of its area. But because the new proprietors showed considerable interest in the New Amstel colony and because this colony now had a greater measure of independence than heretofore, its position had really grown in importance. Stuyvesant continued to exercise control over New Amstel in judicial affairs and to supervise commerce on the Delaware River until 1663, when all the lands on the Delaware, including the Jersey shore to a depth of three miles, were transferred to the city of Amsterdam, primarily because of conflicts over the jurisdiction of the director of the city colony of New Amstel and the vice-director of the company colony, who was now located at the former Swedish village on the Christina, called Altena by the Dutch, later part of Wilmington. So in 1663 New Castle again became the capital of the Delaware Valley, but its history was soon to undergo another change, for the rule of the Dutch on the Delaware was nearly at an end; another nation, and another name, were about to come to New Castle. In the first half of the seventeenth century, during the years when the New Netherland colony was planted in America, the Dutch were fighting for the independence of their homeland against the Span-

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ish king and various monarchs allied with him. In that same period, the English fought intermittently against the Spaniard and engaged also in civil wars among themselves. By 1648 the power of Spain was humbled, and the circumstances that had previously made England and Holland uncertain and uneasy allies were now altered. Many circumstances, but especially their commercial rivalry on the high seas, brought them into conflict. The result was that three wars were fought between the English and the Dutch in the third quarter of the aforementioned century, the seventeenth. Through the first of these wars, the settlements on the Delaware passed unscathed. But shortly before the outbreak of the second, the English king granted his brother, the Duke of York, the territory in America between the Connecticut and the Delaware rivers. This, of course, was the greater part of the New Netherland, and its grant meant that the English were determined at last to eradicate from America what they regarded as Dutch usurpations of English soil and English trade. After New Amsterdam had been seized by an English fleet, without combat, and rechristened New York, two ships under Sir Robert Carr were detached and sent to the Delaware. When they appeared at New Amstel in the early fall of 1664, the Dutch director there, Alexander D’Hinoyossa, who had succeeded Jacob Alrichs at the latter’s death, refused to surrender, and, for once, New Castle changed hands only after a battle. Several Dutch soldiers were killed before the fort and the town were in English hands, and the history of New Amstel and of the Dutch domain on the Delaware was over—or almost over. The other settlements on the Delaware surrendered after New Amstel was taken, and peace reigned on the Delaware for the next century, except for the time of the Third Dutch War. For the Dutch did come back. The Delaware settlements remained as vulnerable to naval power as ever, and a Dutch fleet in 1673 was able to reconquer all the New Netherland without contest. But the reconquest was short-lived, for a peace based on mutual restitution of seized territory was negotiated between Dutch and English in 1674, one year after the seizure. Thereafter the Delaware was securely English until the American Revolution.

V The Duke of York commanded both less and more territory than he had been granted. His grant was from the Connecticut River to

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the Delaware River; his claim to part of the Connecticut Valley was never made good, whereas his territory was stretched across the Delaware, and he ruled New Amstel and the Swedish and Dutch settlements on the west shore of the Delaware by right of conquest, rather than by grant. Lord Baltimore contested York’s rule, but it was difficult for anyone successfully to contest the title of the brother of the king, particularly when he was in possession of much of the disputed land. New Castle had gained a new name from the coming of the English, but it had lost some political prestige. From the capital of the city of Amsterdam’s colony on the Delaware, New Castle had been reduced again to an appendage of New York. But under the Dutch, New Castle had become accustomed to some dependence on Manhattan Island; after all, it remained the chief town in the Delaware Valley, and geography still lent it the power, if not the title, of a subsidiary capital, where the governor maintained a home. The town itself changed only slowly. Gradually the English element in its varied population increased, and in 1672 it was chartered as a corporation. Its court still had a wide jurisdiction, even in New Jersey. Here, however, on the Jersey side of the Delaware, new settlements appeared in the 1670s when Salem and Burlington were planted by English Quakers. Suzerainty here was in dispute. The Duke of York had granted away New Jersey in the year of his conquest, but his officials in America continued to claim an overlordship of that land. New courts were established at these Jersey towns and on the west bank of the Delaware, where six courts existed by 1682, two below New Castle and three above. The end of the primacy of New Castle on the river was definitely marked in 1681, when William Penn was granted his great province north of New Castle. Here he proposed to found a new city as his capital, and as Philadelphia grew, the comparative importance of New Castle declined. But New Castle’s loss of prestige was neither complete nor immediate. For a time there was a commercial rivalry between the two communities. Even in Philadelphia’s success, New Castle found some gain. The rapid growth of Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania hinterland brought more traffic into the Delaware than the river had ever known before. Philadelphia shipping, inward or outward bound, had to pass New Castle and found it convenient to stop. There cargoes could be landed that were destined for the lower Del-

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aware valley. There, too, was a convenient point for the transfer of goods, overland by cart, to the nearby Chesapeake and its rich plantations. Thousands of immigrants disembarked at New Castle, where ship captains often sold the indentures of the poor among their passengers to assembled planters. It was especially an entry point for the huge Scotch-Irish migration of the eighteenth century. An educated, independent, ambitious lot, the Scotch-Irish spread west from New Castle to the mountains and the Great Valley and beyond. Many of them stayed in the region where they landed; so many that the county about New Castle assumed a distinctly Calvinist tone in comparison with southern Delaware, an Anglican land populated to a high degree by Marylanders pushing eastward from the Chesapeake. Charles Thomson, merchant, scholar, and secretary of the Continental Congress, and William Paterson, of New Jersey, were but two of the men entering America at New Castle who were marked for distinction.

VI William Penn had not rested content with his Pennsylvania grant, from which New Castle and a region within twelve miles around it were specifically excluded by action of an agent of the Duke of York. The royal prince was applied to, the result being a grant from York to Penn of New Castle, Kent, and Sussex, the three lower counties on the Delaware. Thus Penn needed fear no danger of being cooped up in an inland empire as the New Sweden colony had been threatened by Stuyvesant’s Fort Casimir. New Castle would not be an alien tollhouse to the Quaker province—here would be no second Danish sounds. Coming to America in 1682, the new proprietor (Penn) landed at New Castle to perform the ceremony of livery of seisin in token of possession before proceeding up river. In Chester, Penn gathered the first general assembly or representative legislature for this area, the province of Pennsylvania and the three lower counties being equally represented. Here an act of union was adopted for Penn’s two colonies, an act that joined the government of Pennsylvania and Delaware for about two decades. There was just one flaw to Penn’s title. The Duke of York had given to Penn the lower counties, but the duke himself had no writ-

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ten title to them. A year later, in 1683 (New Style), King Charles made a formal grant of these lands to the duke, presumably so that the duke might repeat his grant to Penn and so bulwark Penn’s title. But the last step was never taken. The duke became king himself in 1685, and the lower counties thus reverted to royal possession. The brief and troubled reign that followed left little opportunity for the ratification of a flaw in a title to a piece of land on the shore of a colonial river. A practical solution was found for the problem. Although Baltimore’s claims to the lower counties were defeated only after generations of litigation, the question of whether this territory was directly subordinate to Penn or the king was settled by permitting the deputy governor of Pennsylvania to fill a similar role in the lower counties by royal approval and at the royal pleasure. There was, then, after 1682, one governor and one legislature for all the west shore of the Delaware—but there was not one capital. Philadelphia, of course, was the preeminent city, but the assembly peregrinated, meeting either at Philadelphia, or at Chester, or at New Castle. This legislative union was not a happy one. Continual bickerings arose between the delegates from the two Penn domains, until finally the proprietor reluctantly granted the lower counties an assembly of their own, union being maintained only through the person of the governor. That worthy lived in Pennsylvania, but he came to the lower counties whenever the assembly met. It was always to New Castle that he came, for there the first separate colonial assembly for the lower counties met in 1704 and there the last colonial assembly met in 1776, incidentally with a Rodney presiding on each occasion. At every assembly time, New Castle took on an air of special importance as the capital of a small but remarkably independent colony. There was the governor, staying at the best inn, sending a message to the assembly, receiving delegations from it and discussing legislation, signing his approval to its action, and finally preparing to depart after receiving a gift for his pains. There too were the assembled gentlemen and yeomen delegates from three counties, men of no great distinction, but each important in his own bailiwick, their responsibility enlarged by the fact that their actions would pass for review before no alien group, for the lower counties were so lost sight of in the administration of the British empire that their laws do not seem to have been submitted to the usual review by the crown. There too, at election time, gathered the voters of New Castle

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County, proprietors of fifty acres of which twelve were cleared, or of property worth forty pounds. As they cast written ballots for their assemblymen, they might swell with importance at the knowledge that they lived in a land without a resident governor, without any regular royal review of the laws the men of their choice would make. It was in this small town, in 1765, that the assembly adopted resolutions ‘‘relative to the Liberties and Privileges of the Inhabitants of this Government and setting forth the Grievances the said Inhabitants Labour under from some late Acts of Parliament,’’ primarily the Stamp Act. When that act was repealed, a traveler wrote that New Castle ‘‘was illuminated on the occasion . . . and really made a pretty Appearance from the Water.’’ In this town the assembly protested other British acts in terms that called them subversive of the assembly’s ‘‘natural, constitutional and just Rights and Privileges’’ and ‘‘pernicious to American freedom.’’ In this town, after a series of such protests, the assembly sent delegates in 1774 to convene with those of other colonies in a Continental Congress. In this town the assemblymen took a further daring step on June 15, 1776, when they cast off English rule, renounced the king’s authority, and severed their three counties from all dependence on England. And in this town, later in that year (1776), an elected constitutional convention framed a government for this new political unit, to which they gave a name. No longer was it to be ‘‘the lower counties,’’ ‘‘Penn’s territories,’’ or ‘‘New Castle, Kent, and Sussex upon Delaware.’’ Now it was ‘‘The Delaware State’’— born in New Castle.

VII The American Revolution was not altogether to New Castle’s immediate advantage. The ancient weakness of the town remained; it was powerless to defend itself against a strong naval force. In 1777, such a force appeared again: this time, as in 1664, an English fleet. With an English army established in Philadelphia in the fall of 1777, the Delaware River became an English supply line, and English ships and English soldiers might seize New Castle whenever they chose. It was not safe for the yeomanry of the county to gather there to vote that year; elections, consequently, were held in Newark. Nor could the General Assembly dare to meet in the range of English guns. The county polls were restored to New Castle after the British evacu-

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ated Philadelphia in 1778, and, though other polling places were eventually opened throughout the county, New Castle remained the seat of county government until 1881. Not so with the state government. The Revolutionary War was sufficiently upsetting to established colonial customs to permit respect for the demands of newer areas in each State for a more centrally located capital than colonial usage had provided. In the Revolutionary era Pennsylvania’s capital was moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster, the capital of Virginia from Williamsburg to Richmond. Similarly the Delaware assembly, after a period of uncertainty, in 1777 settled at Dover, in Kent County, a town far, in the Delaware sense, from the guns of any eighteenth-century fleet, and also a town centrally located in the state. Economic preeminence in Delaware had begun to pass from New Castle even before its political preeminence was gone. Spurred by the activities of a group of Quaker merchants, the town of Wilmington, laid out in 1731 near the little Swedish hamlet on the Christina, continued to grow. Soon after midcentury the Anglican rector at New Castle complained of its eclipse: ‘‘The town of Newcastle . . . waxes poorer and poorer, And falls into Contempt more and more every year . . . This dying Condition is partly owing to an upstart village [Wilmington] lying on a Neighbouring creek, which yields a convenient port to the adjacent country.’’ In 1777, Ambrose Serle, secretary to a British admiral, found New Castle ‘‘inferior in Size & every other Respect to Wilmington.’’ But a renascence of prosperity lay just ahead for New Castle. After the Revolution the growth of American trade, especially the domestic, interstate commerce, profited New Castle, for the old town found itself on a main avenue between the North and the South for traffic that did not go on the ocean. Bulk goods were carried more cheaply on water than on land; passengers for their ease and their safety also were apt to choose ships over stages. Because the all-water route between Philadelphia and Baltimore, both rapidly expanding cities, was so long around Cape Charles, a compromise was found— from Philadelphia down the Delaware to New Castle by river boat, then a short portage across the head of the Delmarva Peninsula from New Castle to Frenchtown, Maryland, on the Elk River, and finally down the Elk by boat to the Chesapeake and on it to Baltimore. Packets, boats making regular sailings, were introduced on the river to care for the increasing trade—boats like the Morning Star and the Fly, ‘‘built purposely for this trade.’’ ‘‘Their cabbins,’’ their

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New Castle Waterfront, circa 1825, by an unknown artist. Better known in the later watercolor painting by Robert Shaw. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington.

owner advertised, ‘‘are commodious, airy, neat and convenient; and by the addition of folding doors, a part is rendered private for ladies, or select parties . . . To render the passage agreeable, the commanders are always provided with a supply of the best liquors and provisions.’’ A gazetteer in 1807 told of the trade of New Castle: ‘‘All vessels bound from Philadelphia to foreign ports stop here and supply with live stock. A great line of packets and stages passes through from Philadelphia to Baltimore by way of Frenchtown in Cecil County, Maryland. Vast quantities of merchandise are sent to the West. It is at present one of the greatest thorough-fares in the United States. Seven large packet boats sail from New Castle to Philadelphia, ten to fifteen Conestoga wagons cross to Frenchtown and four large stages.’’ After the War of 1812, steamboats became common on the Delaware. The road, like the ships, underwent improvements. A turnpike company was chartered in 1809, and a railroad (both were named the New Castle and Frenchtown) in 1829. When the rails were laid (flat iron bars on cedar rails fixed on granite blocks) horses were used to pull the cars till a locomotive could be procured from England. Even with horses, the four to five hours of stage time were cut to an hour and a half. When, finally, in 1832, steam power came to this early American railroad, observers were almost breathless at the wonder: ‘‘All eyes were . . . directed,’’ one wrote, ‘‘to that apparently animated and

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living contrivance called a locomotive engine, which, on this occasion was to lead off its own tender and 11 cars, carrying altogether 165 persons, the whole weighing about 36 tons. At the given signal, the locomotive began its living breathing & triumphant motion, slow at first—then faster . . . until we were soon going at the rate of a mile in a little over three minutes. We found ourselves at the expiration of an hour and 9 minutes at the landing place at Frenchtown. Not an incident happened to break the spell of the enchantment which we all felt in cutting the air at this rate . . . We could not help thinking of the days when we have had . . . the risk at every turn of the wheels of the stages, of being capsized & broken to pieces, bones & all.’’ The new surge of prosperity meant new building in the old town, which before the Revolution, had ‘‘several houses without inhabitants, & Some not fit for habitation,’’ where the buildings had seemed to Ambrose Serle ‘‘mean & scattered,’’ the merchants were profiting and could erect new homes, and so could the lawyers clustered at the county seat, who could profit not only from New Castle’s trade, but from all the growth of the county, from Wilmington’s expansion and from increasing values of farms. Farmers and farm owners could also improve their homes. Their estates had generally pleased travelers, even unfriendly Serle, who confessed: ‘‘its [New Castle’s] Environs . . . are by far the most pleasant and most fertile Lands I have yet seen in America.’’ Andrew Burnaby sounded an echoing note: ‘‘The country [near New Castle] bore a different aspect from anything I had hitherto seen in America. It was much better cultivated and beautiful laid out into fields of clover, grain, and flax.’’

VIII But this Augustan age of New Castle was not to last for long; a period of recession soon set in. The methods and the routes of commerce changed, and the physical situation of New Castle did not allow easy adaptation to the new conditions. For one thing, New Castle had no rich interior region to supply. Her hinterland was limited in extent by the narrowness of the peninsula between the Delaware and the Chesapeake. Wilmington was close to Lancaster County, closer even than Philadelphia. Baltimore could look to the Ohio.

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New Castle could only furnish a route to the Chesapeake, which it could not dominate. No river or canal brought her the rich produce of western farms. The Delaware was at her door, but it led to Philadelphia, not to New Castle. No stream could be used by New Castle as the Virginia rivers by Norfolk, the Hudson by New York, or even the little Christina by Wilmington. New Castle had no falls, no fuel, to run mills and encourage manufactures. Trenton was at the falls of the Delaware; Philadelphia had the falls of the Schuylkill; Wilmington had the falls of the Brandywine. When railroads ceased to be used primarily to connect waterways, New Castle’s growth was stopped. The Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad was constructed in 1837 and very soon became a main link in the north-south rail route of the Atlantic states. It seized upon much of the traffic that had once moved through New Castle, but it bypassed that town. Bulk goods that still sought water transport were sent through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, completed in 1829, which had its eastern terminus at Delaware City, south of New Castle. New Castle was laid aside by modern progress, left to its court house, and its old ways, and its memories. But therein lay good fortune too. For its Federal homes were not replaced by unsightly warehouses, its Green was not paved, its Strand did not become a row of shops with false facades, no office buildings sneered down at the spire of Immanuel Church. The twentieth century was not altogether relenting. Factories did perch on the outskirts of the town. Industrial ugliness closed round it. Heavy trucks rumbled onto the ferry. But the Green remains, calm and unchanging, and about it a few blocks of the old to be shown to the new. And the people as always are varied. The old Dutch stock is here and the Flemish, Swedish, French, African, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, English, and Polish. Here is the old town and here are the people. They may all claim it and cherish it and read in it its story, America’s heritage. And the town, which accepted Dutch and Swedes and English in turn, has room for more. It offers a sense of the dignity of the past and of enduring values, an understanding of man’s achievements and his failures.




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Among the various works that were used in the preparation of this essay, especial indebtedness is due to: Eckman, Jeanette. ‘‘Life among the early Dutch at New Castle.’’ Delaware History 4, no. 3 (June 1951): 246–302. Eckman, Jeanette, ed. New Castle on the Delaware. Dutch Tercentenary edition. New Castle, 1950. 151 pp. Myers, Albert Cook, ed. Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, 1630–1707. New York, 1912. 476 pp. Reed, H. Clay, ed. Delaware: A History of the First State. New York, 1947. Vols. 1 and 2 (3rd vol. not used and does not carry Reed name). Rodney, Richard S. ‘‘Early Relations of Delaware and Pennsylvania.’’ Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 54 (July 1930): 209–40. Wootten, Mrs. Bayard, and Anthony Higgins. New Castle, Delaware, 1651–1939. Boston, I939. 99 pp.

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4 Nonresident Representation in the Continental Congress: The Delaware Delegation of 1782 In writing my doctoral dissertation, later published, with minor additions, as Federalist Delaware, 1775–1815 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1954), I was surprised at the willingness of the Delaware legislature to send nonresidents to represent their state in the Continental Congress. When time permitted I checked the biographies of delegates to Congress to see whether other states acted like Delaware in choosing nonresidents to represent them. I was particularly intrigued by Samuel Wharton’s obvious interest in furthering the claims of some land speculators to share in the vast western domains between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. The results of my study were published in the William and Mary Quarterly in April 1952 (vol. 9, pp. 166–90).

WHEN THE QUESTION OF RESIDENCE WAS INJECTED INTO THE CONGRESsional campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., in 1949, attention was drawn to the decided difference between British and American ideas regarding representation. Not only does the Constitution of the United States require that members of Congress be inhabitants of the states which they represent, but custom and the provincialism of American politics—and, in many cases, state laws—demand that these legislators reside in the congressional districts from which they are elected. Assemblyman Owen McGivern, speaking at the clubhouse of the Peter J. Dooling Association, according to the New York Times of March 20, 1949, declared of the Roosevelt candidacy for the Democratic nomination to Congress: ‘‘No interloper, whether he lives in Nassau or Dutchess County, can come into this district and claim by divine right the nomination for Congress from the West Side. If an outsider or country squire thinks he is going to ride the 87

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hounds along Tenth Avenue, he has another guess coming.’’ Tammany leader Hugo E. Rogers agreed. ‘‘We don’t have to go outside the district for an outstanding candidate,’’ the Times of April 21, 1949, reported him as saying. ‘‘There were fifty aspirants for the nomination and no Joe Blow can come in from Idaho and tell us what we have to do. . . . So long as I am leader no one is going to come into a district from the outside and get a job.’’1 While residential requirements for legislators may seem to suit the federal nature of American government, they are not essential to it, and in view of British practices contemporary with the planting of the American colonies, as well as of customs developing within the colonies themselves, such strict requirements are surprising. Residential rules had existed in England at the time the American settlements were made, but they were more honored in the breach than in the observance. Before the end of the sixteenth century, these laws providing that ‘‘knights of the shire and citizens and burgesses should be dwelling and resident’’ within their constituencies ‘‘had fallen into desuetude,’’ and in 1620 a committee of the Commons proposed that they be repealed. Repeal, however, was not voted until 1774, when it was declared that the residence acts ‘‘have been found by long usage to be unnecessary and have become obsolete.’’2 In the American colonies residence requirements similar to the statutory requirements in England were widely adopted, for the early colonial electoral systems were largely modeled on ‘‘the system which theoretically prevailed in England.’’3 The colonial American, however, like his English cousin, sometimes demonstrated a willingness to overlook any statutory requirement that an assemblyman reside in the county, hundred, parish, town, or borough that he represented.4 Not unnaturally, the American legislative experience having been intracolonial, the colonies looked within themselves for their delegates when the Continental Congress first came into being. It might have been expected that as the exigencies of war hurried the development of an American nationalism in form as well as in spirit, the same tendencies to disregard residence might have become apparent in Congress that had already manifested themselves in parliament and in the assemblies. Yet only one of the thirteen rebelling states sent nonresident representatives to Congress,5 and that state, Delaware, abandoned the practice six years before the adoption of the Federal Constitution. Because the establishment of residential representation in Congress as a political norm antedates the Consti-

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tution and its specific residence mandate, a study of the circumstances surrounding the use and the abandonment of nonresident representation in Congress may be of value and of general interest as an illustration of the development of American political mores.

I Through its history the Continental Congress was frequently troubled by poor attendance. Its presidents, its secretary, individuals among the delegates wrote their absent confreres and begged them to attend. Important work was hindered, they declared: lack of a quorum prevented the solution of problems of war and peace. At each crisis laggards eventually arrived, but soon terms ended, homes called, and new departures spurred new letters to implore attendance. Despite the proximity of Delaware to the various seats of the Continental Congress, this little state, like its sisters, found it difficult to keep delegates in attendance. If proximity made it easy for Delaware delegates to get to Congress, it also made it easy for them to get away. Plural office-holding interposed another difficulty. A congressman was often also an assemblyman, and perhaps a militia officer too. Which of the functions of this peninsular Pooh-Bah was the most important could not always be resolved with a continental bias, for the state was itself a nation of sorts—small sorts, indeed—and the General Assembly a sovereign congress. Then too the small population limited the number of those fitted and spirited for congressional service. No use to send a delegate like James Sykes, who would be frightened and overawed by his surroundings. ‘‘I am by no means fit for my task,’’ he confessed. ‘‘I am in a most disagreeable situation, a stranger to every person, unable to speak my sentiments in Congress, and no colleague to confer with on any subject that may concern our State.’’6 Then he fled. Another factor deterring Delawareans from going to Congress was the vulnerability of their state to enemy raids. Inhabiting a narrow strip on the coast, a low land intersected by navigable streams that in peace were avenues to markets and to money, Delawareans might well hesitate to leave their wives and families and their crops defenseless before the refugee loyalists and British sailors who roved through the river and bay or waited at the capes to disrupt American shipping.

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Declinations of appointment to Congress were consequently frequent. ‘‘I return my sincerest Thanks,’’ wrote John Dickinson, ‘‘for the Honor conferr’d upon Me by my being appointed a Delegate to represent this State in Congress, [but] I am . . . exceedingly sorry, that Several Reasons oblige Me to decline accepting that Office.’’7 ‘‘My state of health at present is such that I could not with conveniency go abroad,’’ declared John Evans, who meant by ‘‘abroad’’ to Baltimore, where Congress then sat.8 Other delegates who accepted appointment waited long for compensation and accused the state of ingratitude. ‘‘I am determined,’’ wrote Nicholas Van Dyke, ‘‘no longer to serve on my own Expences. I have done it for two Years, considering the Distresses of the State etc. but now they may do better and must, if they mean to be represented in that House.’’9 Thomas McKean had a similar complaint. ‘‘The public duty I am obliged to perform is too much for me,’’ he objected. ‘‘The truth is, should my health and strength hold out, my finances will not.’’ But though he had ‘‘not received a farthing’’ in a year and a half, he would ‘‘not quit the Helm in the midst of a storm.’’10 Circumstances, however, made it somewhat easier for McKean to take the helm than for other Delawareans, for he was a resident of Philadelphia and had so been since before the Revolution.11 One helmsman, however, was no longer enough once the Articles of Confederation were ratified. ‘‘A new Era [would] commence,’’ warned McKean, when the Confederation was completed, for Article 5 clearly stated, ‘‘No State shall be represented in Congress by less than two, nor by more than seven members.’’12 The phrase ‘‘more than seven’’ could be disregarded; ‘‘less than two’’ was the problem. No immediate solution was found. Delaware was honored in the summer of 1781 by the election of McKean to the presidency of Congress, only to be embarrassed when Congress ordered its president to request his own state to complete its delegation.13 Further embarrassment followed; the year rolled round and no other Delaware delegate appeared. What Delaware needed was obviously another McKean, someone else who could, by convenience of residence, and would, by reason of interest, attend the sessions of Congress and represent Delaware. But McKean, who was also chief justice of Pennsylvania, was sometimes absent on judicial duties. On second thought, two more McKeans were needed to assure representation. And add a real Delaware resident for good measure; after all, if seven men could be

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Thomas McKean (1734–1817). During the Revolution McKean served at the same time as a judge in Pennsylvania and as a Congressman from Delaware. Engraving by T. B. Welch after a painting by Gilbert Stuart. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington.

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named, four would do as well as the usual three. On February 3, 1782, therefore, the General Assembly of the Delaware State elected Thomas McKean, Philemon Dickinson, Samuel Wharton, and Caesar Rodney ‘‘Delegates to the Congress of the United States for the present year.’’14

II Caesar Rodney was, of course, the one real residenter in the delegation. He had served in Congress before, from 1774 through 1776, but had then been dropped, along with McKean, by an unfriendly assembly, probably as a result of local feuds not unconnected with his—and McKean’s—advocacy of independence. But when the British invaded Delaware in September 1777, captured the chief executive, and established themselves in Philadelphia and on the river, his state, now in the front line of the war, had made him its president. His term ended in 1781, and he was free for congressional service again. Free, that is, officially; physically he was declining. ‘‘The Issue is Joined,’’ he wrote, ‘‘and must now be Tryed. The Doctor must conquer the Cancer, or the Cancer will conquer me.’’15 Rodney went to Philadelphia to have his ailment treated, but apparently he never attended Congress. He died in 1784. Philemon Dickinson, though reared in Delaware, had not lived there for fifteen years. He had moved to an estate near Trenton, in New Jersey, in 1767, when he was married to Mary Cadwallader, and had filled several public posts in the state of his adoption. As one of the Delaware valley gentry, with property in Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, he could easily get to Philadelphia for sessions of Congress, he could afford to stay there and attend them, and his own interests were sufficiently intercolonial to insure his attention to affairs of the Confederation. Delaware might expect such service from him as she had from McKean, and with reason, for she got it. Dickinson came to Congress in the month of his election, attended fairly faithfully until midsummer, and returned for a time in the fall and again in the winter.16 As far as representation in Congress was concerned, the choice of Samuel Wharton proved even more advantageous than that of McKean or Dickinson. This Philadelphia merchant was most faithful in attending Congress, as in reporting its sessions to the assembly that had chosen him. But his choice by Delaware is, at first glance, per-

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plexing. Like McKean and Dickinson he was not a resident of Delaware, but unlike them, he never had resided in Delaware and, so far as is known, was not a property holder there.17 He was, however, an old friend of John Dickinson, president of Delaware at the time of his choice, and of George Read, probably the most influential figure in Delaware politics.18 As a member of the firm of Baynton and Wharton, later, Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan, he had had many business connections with Delaware.19 As a leading spokesman for speculators in western lands, he had been associated with George Ross, Read’s brother-in-law, and William Thompson, who had married Mrs. Read’s sister.20 The election of this delegation is significant not only as an attempt by Delaware to solve its problems of securing delegates willing and able to attend Congress, but also in that it marks the triumph in this state of a faction whose views, like their business interests and social connections, were intercolonial—riparian, at least, if not continental—and who saw the necessity of a strong central government for their own protection.21 The best-known Delaware representative of this group, John Dickinson, had declared upon his election to Congress from Delaware in 1779, ‘‘I am bound to prefer the general Interests of the Confederacy to the partial Interests of Constituent Members.’’22 In the fall of 1781 Dickinson had lost an election in Pennsylvania but in Delaware had been elected first to the Legislative Council from New Castle County, where he had no residence, his Delaware home being in Kent County, and then to the state presidency to succeed Rodney.23 The same General Assembly that chose a man of Dickinson’s continental view for president sent McKean, Wharton, and Philemon Dickinson to Congress. Such a delegation was entirely satisfactory from a nationalist point of view, for had Dickinson’s draft of the Articles of Confederation prevailed, the states would have been units of minor importance and Congress would have been the supreme authority in the land.24 It was satisfactory, too, to the Delaware merchants and landed gentry whose property and kinships had spread beyond the three counties to the Chesapeake and up the Delaware. George Read, for example, was born in Cecil County, Maryland, read law in Philadelphia, practiced in Delaware, had brothers living in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and in-laws throughout the four states. The Ridgelys and the Chews may serve as examples of other families who were well connected, economically and familially, throughout the Delaware Valley.25

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These connections of Delawareans with the Philadelphia mercantile group also help explain the encouragement given Samuel Wharton to prosecute his business interests in Congress. Wharton had spent a decade in England prior to 1778 as a representative of land speculators, particularly of the Indiana and Vandalia groups, seeking to secure authorization of their claims from the British government. Failing, he had returned to America to pin his hopes on the Congress. The Indiana and Vandalia claims were to lands along the east bank of the Ohio that were also claimed by Virginia. This state, partly because of the conflicting speculative interests of some of her prominent citizens, refused to recognize the Indiana and Vandalia claimants, who then appealed to Congress to force recognition of their grants. They argued that bounds should be set to the claims of Virginia and that the trans-Appalachian lands should be controlled by Congress. Baltimore and Philadelphia were the focal centers of the Indiana and Vandalia speculators, who were encouraged to find in agreement with them the nonspeculative interest of the landless states—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland—socalled because their western frontiers were already limited. By both its landless condition and its intimate connection with the Philadelphia mercantile group of which the land speculators were a part, Delaware was led to oppose extensive western land claims by individual states. George Read had argued in 1778 that the extensive claims of Virginia and Massachusetts were ‘‘absurd’’ and ‘‘dangerous to the liberties of America,’’ and that ‘‘all lands not purchased from or ceded by the Indians to the king of Great Britain’’ ought to be ‘‘considered as belonging to the United States generally.’’26 A year later, in ratifying the Articles of Confederation, Delaware, the next-to-last state to join the Confederation, officially objected to the lack of bounds on the land claims of states.27 The presence in its 1782 delegation of such an opponent of the Virginia claims as Samuel Wharton was then in this respect not unsatisfactory to Delaware. The expedient adopted by Delaware to get representation in Congress in 1782 accorded conveniently, though perhaps not purposefully, with the desires of the local conservative leadership for a stronger national government as one insuring greater protection to the institutions that they cherished. When a government more suitable to their desires had been prepared by the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the Delaware leadership hastened to ratify it, although by that time their experiment, if such the device of 1782 may be called, in national, nonresidential representation had failed.

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III State particularism brought an end to the use of nonresident representatives by Delaware; and the vulnerable record of Wharton helped it to do so. Mercantile interrelationships of the Delaware River Valley, of Philadelphia, the metropolis, and of its agrarian hinterlands, eastern Pennsylvania, the Delaware counties, and western New Jersey, prompted an interstate point of view, and intercolonial social and political connections had formed in this area like the economic.28 These ties were most clearly seen by the mercantile aristocracy to which such men as John Dickinson and George Read belonged. But decades of political separation, of agrarian isolation, of intellectual inbreeding had produced in addition, a concept of the Delaware colony as a nation, a state pride, a jealousy of the outlander, particularly among those of the humbler people who sensed only the smaller details of the mechanics of intercolonial relations. Personal vendettas and political feuds supplemented localism and encouraged opposition to the national views of those responsible for the 1782 election. Long before the choice of the nonresident delegation, Thomas Rodney had expressed himself strongly, on the subject of representation. ‘‘You may be assured that State interest prevails so much in [Congress] at present,’’ he wrote his brother Caesar in October 1781, ‘‘that you want members whose particular and strong attachment to this State will not let them be carried away by Junto’s or parties.’’29 The delegate election in February was consequently a shock to him, especially in the choice of Wharton. ‘‘In my opinion,’’ he declared to Caesar, ‘‘it is very Extraordinary indeed to appoint a man who has been all the war and long before residing in England intimate with ministerial and political men, and has no knowledge of or connection with the affairs of this State, and perhaps hardly an acquaintance in it except with G. Read—but this is a Sample of a new system of Politics now Established.’’ Rodney also reported that Colonel George Latimer, an assemblyman, had told him that the election had taken place after he left the assembly, that he would not have voted for Philemon Dickinson or Wharton, and ‘‘That the appointment was very Supprizing and especially the Latter.’’30 Nor was the dissatisfaction with the election of Wharton, at least, confined to Delaware. The contentious Dr. Arthur Lee, who bore an

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old grudge, was shocked to find Wharton in Congress, and blasted him and his business interests in a letter to Samuel Adams: ‘‘What can be expected from an Assembly in which a Member is allowed to sit, who is avowedly an Agent for the Enemies to our cause and Country, an Insolvent, and a profligate Adventurer. I mean Mr. Samuel Wharton. This Man, Sir, that in a Petition on the table of Congress declares himself insolvent, not only sits and votes, but treats the Members with magnificent Dinners.’’31 In the Pennsylvania Journal, ‘‘A Watchman of Delaware’’ condemned the example set by Delaware ‘‘of chusing a man from Philadelphia, to represent it in congress, who is just smoaking from the fountains of corruption.’’ Some ‘‘puny Whigs’’ who ‘‘can only act from interested motives, . . . may agree with the Delaware State (which is a kind of half way place between the United States and the British) and with that state neglect its best friends and travel abroad in search of gentry to rule over them.’’ ‘‘If Mr. W. who only arrived here the other day, can for certain purposes, secure a seat in Congress, why may not Mr. Galloway be soon expected, as he undoubtedly can produce a precedent for claiming the same honor.’’32 The assembly had attempted to compensate for the want of ‘‘a particular and strong attachment’’ to Delaware on the part of a portion of the delegation by adopting long and detailed instructions, drafted, it is said, by John Dickinson, to govern their actions in Congress.33 It was admitted that most of the affairs of Congress were ‘‘so varied and complicated’’ that it was ‘‘impossible . . . to point out with precision the conduct’’ expected of the delegates. They should, however, agree among themselves regarding their attendance so that the state would always be represented, and they should encourage all measures for ‘‘the freedom, independence and happiness of the United States in general, and of this State in particular.’’ They were advised to see that due regard was taken to the rights of Delaware to the islands in the river and to the rights of her citizens to their shallops recaptured from the British. More significantly, however, in view of the presence of Wharton in the delegation, they were urged to press all of Delaware’s previously stated objections to the Articles of Confederation and required to do their utmost to obtain, ‘‘without any delay whatever, a final settlement of the boundaries of those States whose claims are immoderate, and of the rights of the United States. . . .’’ ‘‘This business,’’ the assembly continued with its instructions, ‘‘we judge to be of the first magnitude, as deeply interesting to us and our posterity, and for very strong reasons we

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are clearly of opinion that no time should be lost in bringing it to a conclusion.’’ This was just to Wharton’s taste—Virginia be damned. A final provision of the instructions had not been necessary in years past when the delegates to Congress had frequently been members also of the General Assembly, but, in view of the composition of this delegation, it was now peculiarly appropriate. ‘‘Lastly,’’ it began, ‘‘we beg and desire, that if any particular doubts or difficulties present themselves to your minds on questions of great moment, agitated, or likely to be soon agitated, in Congress, you will communicate them fully to the president of this State, that he may be enabled to judge of the expediency of convening the Legislature and taking their sense theron for your further order.’’34 Whether the delegates communicated fully to President John Dickinson ‘‘any particular doubts or difficulties’’ arising ‘‘on questions of great moment’’ is unknown, but if they wished to do so, they could very easily, since Dickinson spent most of the year in Philadelphia. It is interesting, however, that Samuel Wharton, the delegate whose connection with Delaware and its assemblymen was most tenuous, did frequently write to the speakers of the two houses of the General Assembly; but his letters were intended to inform the assembly of events in Congress, and incidentally to win their sympathy and support, rather than to seek advice.35 No action seems to have been taken on one of the specific items of congressional business on which the delegates had been instructed: the ownership of the islands in the Delaware, although Wharton assured the assembly that ‘‘whenever this Business is brought on . . . the Delegates will give the utmost Attention to it, and display the Right of the Delaware State.’’36 In regard to rights in recaptured shallops, Delaware had its way. McKean served on a congressional committee that recommended revision of the ordinance ‘‘ascertaining what captures on water’’ should be lawful, and Wharton and Philemon Dickinson were also present to cast Delaware’s vote, as instructed, for this measure. That the measure had arisen from ‘‘a memorial of the merchants and traders of Philadelphia’’ indicates further the community of interest of Delaware and the Philadelphia merchants. McKean, Wharton, and Dickinson were in little danger of being torn by contradictory loyalties.37 This was also true in regard to the matter on which the assembly had been most insistent, the western land claims, for here surely Wharton was the most ardent advocate of the Delaware position imaginable. It was, however, the ‘‘rights of the United States’’ and of

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the land companies that occupied him, rather than the bounds of Virginia, for Virginia had offered to cede her claims beyond the Ohio, but with the stipulation that the land companies’ claims should not be recognized. While Wharton was leading the opposition to this cession, Arthur Lee moved that before Congress made any decision regarding it, each delegate should be asked to state whether he was interested in any of the land companies which had ‘‘petitioned against the territorial rights’’ of the ceding state.38 As Wharton explained to the General Assembly: ‘‘I thought it necessary upon this Occasion to rise, and say, That there was not a Member upon the Floor, Who did not know, I was interested in Lands, Westward of the Allegany Mountain. The Memorials and Remonstrances of my Associates and myself lay upon the President’s Table, and had most of them, been in the Secretary’s office, from the Year 1777. . . . That when the private Right of my Associates and myself was taken up, and agitated in Congress,—I should withdraw from the House;—But at all Times, When the Consideration of the Lands, which were vacant and unappropriated at the Revolution, was before Congress, I should to the utmost of my Abilities, vindicate by Argument, and maintain by indisputable Documents, The Right of the United States to these Lands.’’39 Lee’s resolution was never passed, nor was the Virginia cession accepted for the present, but Wharton was disappointed in the hope, which he maintained to the end of his term, of having at least the Indiana Company claim recognized.40 Though McKean and Philemon Dickinson were less active in this affair than Wharton, their votes, when recorded, were with him.41 While the instructions of the delegates said nothing about the admission of Vermont, McKean, Dickinson, and Wharton supported Vermont’s petition, perhaps not altogether from affection for the Vermonters.42 According to Madison, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware wanted Vermont in the Confederation with the ‘‘view of reinforcing the opposition of claims of Western territory particularly those of Virginia,’’ while New Jersey and Delaware were also motivated by ‘‘the additional view of strengthening the interest of the little states.’’ These four states opposed ‘‘the territorial claims, particularly those of Virginia’’ from, in general, ‘‘a lucrative desire of sharing in the vacant territory as a fund of revenue,’’ and from ‘‘the envy and jealousy naturally excited by superior resources and importance,’’ but principally from ‘‘the intrigues of their citizens who are interested in the claims of the land companies.’’43 Ear-

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lier Madison had declared, ‘‘the Vote of Vermont is wished for as an auxiliary agst. the Western claims of Virga. Some of the small States may indeed wish for it also as an auxiliary to their party, but no other motive can prevail with D. and M. [Delaware and Maryland].’’44 Wharton, on the other hand, declared that Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia opposed the recognition of Vermont ‘‘because They were apprehensive, That by establishing a president [sic], of admitting a new State into the Union,—There would soon be one, or more new States erected upon the Territory, Westward of the Allegany Mountain.’’45

IV But in spite of their attention to instructions and their faithful attendance in Congress, the Delaware delegates might well have wondered whether the people of Delaware sufficiently approved of their election to permit their return to Congress in 1783. Wharton, who had the greatest personal stake in the debates in Congress, exhibited the most concern about his place in the delegation. In his first communication to the General Assembly he had acknowledged his gratitude ‘‘for the high mark of Confidence, which They . . . [had] been pleased to place’’ in him. In return for ‘‘this distinguished Honor,’’ he promised, ‘‘it shall be, I assure you;—my Study and pride, by every Means in my Power,—to show myself worthy of the Appointment.’’ As to the attacks on him in the Philadelphia press—‘‘I have not taken the least Notice of [these] publications, apprehending it altogether unbecoming One of your Delegates to dispute with anonymous Scribblers.’’ To the General Assembly, however, he offered evidence of his loyalty and of ‘‘the base falsity’’ of the charges against him, explaining, ‘‘If I had not exercised my Pen upon the Pretensions of Virginia to the vacant Lands,—I should have had no unfounded and unjust surmises, insinuated against me. . . . An attempt was to be made, from a hope, that possibly the Slander might injure Me, in the Opinion of the Honorable House. I would have paid my personal Respects to Them, But the State would have been unrepresented in my Absence.’’ In closing, he pledged ‘‘That so long, as They shall be pleased to concur [he wrote separately to the speaker of each house] in nominating Me, One of the Delegates in Congress, for the Delaware State,—My Time and zealous Exertions shall

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be most faithfully devoted to it’s Service. Actions will be the best Expositors of my Declarations, and to Them, I very cheerfully submit.’’46 Actions were, however, unsatisfactory expositors when there was no one to see them; so as time went by Wharton made increasing efforts to keep the assembly informed of the part he was playing. After the letter just quoted, he wrote no more until October, but as his term neared an end he took pen in hand for the assembly’s benefit more often. On two dates in November he wrote them, once in December, and on four occasions in January.47 If he hoped to win reelection by his letters, they were written in vain. A change had occurred in the government of the three Delaware counties due to the fact that John Dickinson, their president, had on November 7 been elected president of Pennsylvania.48 For the time being, John Cook, president of the upper house of the Delaware legislature, assumed direction of affairs under the name of vice-president, as provided by the state constitution.49 The legislature, when it convened for an adjourned session in January 1783, had to decide what to do about the presidency and whether to reelect the congressional delegation of 1782. The assembly soon received a message from Dickinson, informing them of his new election, hoping for their approval of his ‘‘engaging in the employment that has been mentioned, in a sister and neighbor State—the true interests of both being, by situation and a variety of circumstances, so intimately connected,’’ and asking that ‘‘they consider how earnestly’’ he had ‘‘entreated to be excused from accepting the Presidency here.’’ ‘‘I now do myself the honour of waiting upon you, gentlemen,’’ his message continued, ‘‘to inform you of this event, and to acquaint you, that I am ready to resign the dignity I hold in this Republic, in such manner as you shall judge proper.’’50 He was ‘‘ready to resign,’’ but he had not resigned. Could it be that he was also ready to be persuaded to remain president in absentia?51 As president of Pennsylvania, his term was for only one year; on the other hand, he was also a member of the Pennsylvania Executive Council, where his term was three years. The Delaware presidential term was three years, the constitution stating that on the president’s ‘‘death, inability, or absence from the State, the speaker of the legislative council for the time being shall be vice-president, . . . until a new nomination is made by the general assembly.’’ Only once before had this clause been invoked; President McKinly had been captured by the British in September 1777, whereupon an acting president had served in his stead until March 1778, when the vice-

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president (George Read) had asked ‘‘to be relieved from the duties of that office,’’ and a new president (Caesar Rodney) had been elected.52 Incidentally, one might speculate upon the subject of the conference Dickinson sought with Read at Chester shortly after his election to the Pennsylvania presidency, at which conference Wharton was probably present.53 Could they have there discussed the future government of Delaware? At any rate, a large part of the General Assembly was in no mood to continue Dickinson in office. Perhaps the attacks on him that had appeared in the Philadelphia press—and since there were no Delaware papers, the Philadelphia press served Delaware—had stung them.54 The most pertinent of these was a long letter from ‘‘Valerius’’ to ‘‘the Inhabitants of the Delaware State,’’ which appeared in The Freeman’s Journal—‘‘Bailey’s Chamber-Pot’’ to Dickinson adherents—on Christmas Day, 1782. The Delaware delegation to Congress reminded the author of the rotten borough system in England. ‘‘Are you content,’’ he challenged’’ ‘‘to be recorded in future history as the first American borough, as the rotten part of this great confederacy of independent nations?’’ What are the motives of your delegates? It is ‘‘extremely suspicious’’ that they ‘‘may possibly have some other end to answer, some points to carry, in which your happiness or interest may not be immediately concerned.’’ If they are uncommonly able and patriotic, how can they ‘‘be overlooked in the states to which they belong’’? Your president too has brought ‘‘contempt and ridicule’’ on you ‘‘by making you a mere stepping-stone . . . to the presidential chair of Pennsylvania.’’ You were kept in ignorance of his real intentions. ‘‘In what a contemptible situation are you left? The moment the opportunity offered, your chair of government was left with as little ceremony as this double governor would leave his chair of ease. . . . How justly may the large and populous states complain of your equal voice and deliberative share in national councils, if you do not preserve an equal dignity and due proportion of spirit and independence. . . . It is now with you . . . to place at the head of your government and national councils men of approved virtue and close connections with your state and interests, who will not dare to abuse your confidence or insult your feelings; and should a virtuous and just indignation lead you still further, charity cannot disprove nor candour itself condemn.’’ The lower house of the Delaware legislature accepted Valerius’s advice. To Dickinson’s statement, ‘‘I am ready to resign the dignity I hold in this Republic, in such way as you judge proper,’’ they re-

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turned a conclusive answer: ‘‘the appointment of . . . John Dickinson to the Presidency of the Supreme Executive Council of the Common Wealth of Pennsylvania and his Acceptance thereof, is virtually a Resignation of the Presidency of this State; and that the same is thereby become Vacant,’’ adding ‘‘that it is contrary to the Spirit of the Constitution, and inconsistent with the Dignity, Freedom and Interest of this State, that the President thereof be President or Commander in Chief of any other State.’’55 This house had no intention of letting Delaware return to the state of affairs existing prior to independence, when the governor of Pennsylvania had also served as governor of Delaware. The upper house differed in sentiment. There now ensued a struggle between the two houses of the General Assembly, a struggle that the scanty minutes do not sufficiently illumine. The upper house, in which George Read and Richard Bassett, later Federalist senators, were influential members, was obviously friendly to Dickinson and the congressional delegation; the lower house, in which Nicholas Van Dyke and William Peery, political opponents of Read and Bassett, were active, sought to wrest control from the DickinsonRead faction. The upper house refused to consider the resolutions of the lower house declaring that Dickinson’s actions automatically meant his resignation.56 Thereupon the lower house passed ‘‘An Act to exclude Members of the General Assembly from Places of Profit; to keep certain Officers out of the General Assembly, according to the Meaning and true Intent of the Constitution; and to prevent ‘Sinecures.’ ’’57 The words of the bill are lost—it never became an act, for the upper house, of course, rejected it—but it is probable from the title that it was aimed at George Read, who had, on December 5, 1782, been elected by Congress a judge of the court of appeals in admiralty cases.58 The background of Read’s appointment further displays the interrelations of Delaware Valley politics: the nomination was made by Thomas Fitzsimons, congressman from Pennsylvania, after Read had been forewarned by his brother James, who wrote him on December 3, ‘‘Governor Dickinson . . . told me that after consulting some friends . . . they had determined you should be put in nomination. . . . After I parted from the governor I met Mr. S. Wharton, who told me the nomination was made yesterday, in consequence of some conversation had with Mr. Dickinson.’’59 In this appointment, James Tilton, quarrelsome, erratic Dover physician, a leader of the anti-

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administration faction, found an explanation of the politics of the past year. Some years later, in a vitriolic attack on George Read, Tilton argued that in 1782 Read, seeing American victory in the Revolution at hand and desiring prominence in the new government, had set about making and placing friends in high places, sacrificing the interests of Delaware to those of Pennsylvania. Thus Tilton explained the election of Dickinson to the presidency and of the nonresidents to Congress. Only so much faith can be placed in this argument as in any partisan tract written five years after the event.60 Having received no response from the upper house to their resolutions of January 14 declaring the presidency automatically vacant, the lower house on January 31 requested some answer; return the resolutions, they said, ‘‘either altered, amended, confirmed, or rejected.’’61 Instead of what they requested they received a formal resignation from Dickinson, dated at Dover, January 14, 1783, and accepted by the upper house. The president was being allowed to retire with dignity, but the date of his resignation, the very day on which the lower house declared the presidency already vacant, indicates that his hand had been forced.62 On the same date that the lower house received Dickinson’s resignation, January 31, it also received a communication from Vice-President John Cook, dated January 28, the day on which Dickinson’s resignation had first been read in the upper house over which Cook presided. ‘‘The President of this State having made a Resignation of his Office,’’ said Cook, not admitting the contention of the lower house that the office was automatically vacated by Dickinson’s Pennsylvania election, ‘‘. . . I beg leave to address you upon the subject of the Station I now fill. I find, that the Duties committed to me are so numerous and require greater Attention and Time than I can devote to them, and it will be extremely injurious to my private affairs to continue in the Exercise of the Vice-Presidency after the rising of the General Assembly; I must therefore earnestly request your Honors to proceed, with all convenient Dispatch, to the Choice of a President and Commander in Chief for this State, agreeable to the Constitution.’’63 Cook’s action finally cleared the way for an election; however the presidency was vacated, vacated it was. The election was held on February 1 by the two houses in joint session. Nicholas Van Dyke, a member of the lower house and one of its committee that had prepared the motion declaring the presidency automatically vacant, was chosen as president to succeed Dickinson. The count was eighteen votes out of thirty—a close election

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in any respect but especially when compared with Dickinson’s all but unanimous choice, his own vote being the exception, a year earlier.64 The surviving legislative records give no clue as to who got the twelve minority votes, but a partisan pamphlet declares that the Read forces tried first to elect John McKinly, the once-kidnapped ex-president, ‘‘a mere patch on the back’’ of George Read, and then, failing in that, to elect Chief Justice William Killen, an intimate friend and onetime tutor of the Dickinson family.65 Before the General Assembly could proceed to the election of congressmen, the issue of nonresident delegates had to be clearly met. William Peery, an anti-administration assemblyman from Sussex, moved in the lower house ‘‘That no Person be nominated as a Delegate from this State to Congress who is not an Inhabitant of this State.’’66 The motion was defeated, but its spirit was victorious. Wharton, Philemon Dickinson, and, McKean were turned out of office, the new delegation consisting of three men with no previous congressional experience, James Tilton, Eleazer McComb, and Gunning Bedford, Jr., and one holdover, Caesar Rodney, the only member of the old delegation who had never attended Congress—but also the only one who was, in the words of Peery’s motion, ‘‘an Inhabitant of this State.’’67 Obviously the General Assembly was abandoning the ostensible principle behind the selection of the 1782 delegation, the securing of a regular attendance at Congress, in favor of the recommendation of Thomas Rodney, already quoted, ‘‘that you want members whose particular and strong attachment to this State will not let them be carried away by Junto’s or parties.’’ ‘‘The disgrace of being represented in Congress by foreigners,’’ Tilton asserted, ‘‘had . . . become so generally impressed upon every man of the least delicacy, that it was now no difficult task to appoint residents of the state, instead of our delegates from abroad.’’68 Delawareans had proved their wisdom to ‘‘Valerius,’’ as he explained in The Freeman’s Journal, by treating Dickinson ‘‘with virtuous indignation and contempt,’’ ‘‘by emancipating themselves from the fetters of influence which had been forged for them in Pennsylvania,’’ and ‘‘by annihilating a delegation which sullied the honour of their state.’’69

V State particularism, aroused by attacks on the ‘‘delegates from abroad,’’ had proved too strong to permit the continued use of non-

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resident representation. Delawareans might flee congressional service almost to the extent of the Oxfordshire knights who fled their kingdom rather than go to parliament,70 but they would still be elected no matter what sort of attendance they gave. When Read, in 1786, urged President Van Dyke to make ‘‘an authoritative call upon those presently in the [congressional] delegation of this State to perform that duty or resign their appointment,’’ Van Dyke shunted him off by responding, ‘‘I have regularly made the delegates acquainted with the call of Congress, and urged their attendance by arguments which appeared to me most likely to have effect; and in so doing I considered that I had performed my duty, and exercised all the power of which I was possessed in this business. Had I undertaken to call on them in the manner you mentioned, they doubtless would have considered me officious and desirous of exercising a power to which I had no pretensions.’’71 Van Dyke’s answer could hardly have been satisfactory to Read. Probably on the very day when he received it, Read was writing to his old friend Secretary Thomson: ‘‘Our wants, sir, are many, and among others, that of efficient men, and that of free and truly public sentiment, detached from local and personal prejudices, to exist among the popular leaders in the society, and more energy in all the parts and persons of the government.’’72 To Read—and he is more likely than anyone else to have effected the preferment of Dickinson and Wharton in Delaware—efficiency, energy, and ‘‘truly public sentiment, detached from local and personal prejudices,’’ were far more important than residence. To this view he held,73 and for it he spoke in the Constitutional Convention. There, when residential requirements for congressmen were debated, George Mason declared, according to Madison’s notes, that he ‘‘did not chuse to let foreigners and adventurers make laws for us and govern us. . . . It might also happen that a rich foreign Nation, for example, Great Britain, might send over her tools who might bribe their way into the Legislature for insidious purposes.’’74 Gouverneur Morris objected that a freehold qualification was enough, that ‘‘people rarely chuse a nonresident,’’ but John Rutledge disagreed, moving ‘‘that a residence of 7 years shld. be required in the State wherein the Member shd. be elected. An emigrant from N. England to S. C. or Georgia would know little of its affairs and could not be supposed to acquire a knowledge in less time.’’ This was George Read’s cue. ‘‘Mr. Read reminded that we were

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now forming a Nati[ona]l Govt and such a regulation would correspond little with the idea that we were one people.’’ James Wilson, of Pennsylvania, and Mercer, of Maryland, supported Read. Mason agreed seven years’ residence was too long—Madison had pointed to its difficulties for new states in the West—but he upheld the principle for which he had spoken: ‘‘If residence be not required, Rich men of neighboring States, may employ with success the means of corruption in some particular district and thereby get into the public Councils after having failed in their own State. This is the practice in the boroughs of England.’’75 A compromise was finally reached. No term of residence in the state was prescribed, and the word inhabitant, suggested by Dickinson, was to be used rather than resident: ‘‘an inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.’’76 In adopting this provision, the convention was but limiting the power of the states to do what no state except Delaware had ever done. Its effect, in spite of the arguments of Mencken, has been slight. To use the words of Gouverneur Morris, ‘‘people rarely chuse a nonresident’’ even when they may. Resident representation is an American political folkway. Even Delaware abandoned nonresident representation by its own choice. The decision to do so seems to have had two bases. First, nonresidents should not be sent to Congress because of the principle involved, that it was a disgrace to be represented by foreigners. Such an argument was bound to have meaning to Delawareans, descendants of men so determined to run the affairs of their own bailiwick that they had demanded and secured from William Penn in 1704 an assembly of their own, separate from that of Pennsylvania.77 Secondly, the men involved in the 1782 delegate election and the political events occurring in that year aroused a definite antagonism toward nonresident delegates. John Dickinson’s reentry into Pennsylvania politics stirred the Constitutionalist party there to reproach Delaware for his willingness to leave the smaller state for the larger. Wharton’s questionable record, his obvious self-interest in attending Congress, and his lack of identification with Delaware allowed the reproaches to strike home sharply and, in part, raised the old cry of Whig against Tory, for Dickinson’s—and Read’s—opposition to independence in July, 1776, had not been altogether forgotten. It is notable that the available records indicate no dissatisfaction with the part played by the nonresident delegation in Congress. The rub was elsewhere. McKean’s dual citizenship had been tolerated, even encouraged, for a decade. But now the Read-Dickinson leader-

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ship had gone too far. Personalities and principles were invoked against the nonresidents, and the Delaware experiment of using them to secure attendance at Congress was at an end.

Notes 1. Discussions of the residential qualification for congressman may be found in M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (New York, 1908), 2: 240–41; James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (New York, 1921), 1: 191–95; H. L., Mencken, ‘‘Politics,’’ in Harold E, Stearns, ed., Civilization in the United States (New York, 1922), 21–34. Wrote Mencken: ‘‘[Constitutional provisions regarding residence] have made steadily for parochialism in legislation, for the security and prosperity of petty local bosses and machines, for the multiplication of pocket and rotten boroughs of the worst sort, and, above all, for the progressive degeneration of the honesty and honour of representatives. . . . More, perhaps, than any other single influence they have been responsible for the present debauched and degraded condition of the two houses, and particularly of the lower one. Find me the worst ass in Congress, and I’ll show you a man they have helped to get there and to stay there.’’ Ibid., 21. Mr. Mencken’s state, Maryland, went so far as to make statutory provision that its senatorial seats be divided between the Western Shore and the Eastern Shore from 1809 to 1896, a brief period excepted. James C. Mullikin, ‘‘The Separatist Movement and Related Problems, 1776–1851,’’ in Charles B. Clark, ed., The Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia (New York, 1950), 1: 461–62. Other states do by custom what Maryland did by law. 2. Edward Porritt, The Unreformed House of Commons (Cambridge, 1909), 1: 122. 3. Alfred de Grazia, Public and Republic (New York, 1951), 53. Italics have been added here to emphasize the point made by De Grazia that ‘‘the colonial systems of elections and suffrage would probably be more familiar to an Englishman of the fifteenth century than to one of the time of the colonial settlement.’’ 4. See Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina under the Royal Government, 1719–1776 (New York, 1899), 761. A pertinent dissertation is Hubert Phillips, The Development of a Residential Qualification for Representatives in Colonial Legislatures (Cincinnati, 1921), but since the sources available to the author were incomplete, his findings are not always dependable. For example, Phillips states (p. 244) that there was no nonresident representation in colonial Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. Yet, in 1770 the provincial council of Pennsylvania rejected a bill passed by the assembly ‘‘to prevent any Person being chosen a Member of Assembly for any City or County within this Province, except he be a Resident in such City or County.’’ William Allen, the wealthy Philadelphia merchant, sat as a delegate from Cumberland County in the assembly that passed this bill by Speaker Galloway’s deciding vote. Colonial Records of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1851–1853), 9: 650; Pennsylvania Archives, 8th series (1931–1933), 7: 6487, 6489, 6496, 6502, 6503. As to Delaware’s practice, see John Dickinson’s comment in footnote 23 below. In the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Mercer ‘‘mentioned instances of violent disputes raised in Maryland concerning the term ‘residence,’ ’’ after Madison and

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Gouverneur Morris had pointed to similar disputes in Virginia and New York. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, 1911–1937), 2: 217. 5. Some Georgia delegates—Lyman Hall, Noble Wymberley Jones, Edward Telfair—seem to have been residents of other states at the time of their election to Congress from Georgia. But they were involuntary nonresidents, for they had left Georgia as a consequence of the British occupation in 1778, and they returned to Georgia very soon after the British evacuation in 1782. See Charles C. Jones, Biographical Sketches of the Delegates from Georgia to the Continental Congress (Boston, 1891), especially pp. 97, 135, 166. 6. Sykes to George Read, Philadelphia, Apr. 10, 1777, William T. Read, Life and Correspondence of George Read (Philadelphia, 1870), 261–62. 7. Dickinson to Speakers of Legislative Council and House of Assembly, Kent County, Apr. 12, 1780, Logan Papers, 10: 34. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 8. Evans to George Read, Jan. 6, 1777, Read, George Read, 251–52. 9. Van Dyke to Thomas Rodney, Oct. 15, 1781, Edmund C. Burnett, ed., Letters of Members of the Continental Congress (Washington, 1921–1936), 6: 241–42. 10. McKean to Caesar Rodney, Philadelphia, July 24, 1780, George H. Ryden, ed., Letters to and from Caesar Rodney (Philadelphia, 1933), 359–60. 11. Although McKean was born in Pennsylvania, he began the practice of law and his career as an office holder in New Castle, Delaware, and he maintained his professional and political interests in Delaware for a decade after he moved to Philadelphia. The most important study of McKean’s career is James H. Peeling, ‘‘The Public Life of Thomas McKean, 1734–1817,’’ MS. University of Chicago, 1929. Attacks on McKean because of his plural office-holding are discussed by Robert L. Brunhouse, in The Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1776–1790 (Harrisburg, 1942), 64, 101–2. 12. McKean to Thomas Collins, Philadelphia, Feb. 3, 1781, McKean Papers, 1: 41, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 13. McKean to Livingston, Rodney, et al., Aug. 24, 1781, ibid., 91; Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 (Washington, 1904–1937), 21: 906. Cf. Burnett, Letters, 6: 196. 14. Minutes of the Council of the Delaware State, from 1776 to 1792 (Wilmington, 1887), 710. 15. Rodney to unknown addressee [winter 1782], Ryden, Rodney Letters, 431. 16. Burnett, Letters, 6: xliv, 355n; 7: lxv; Wharton Dickinson, ‘‘Philemon Dickinson: Major General, New Jersey Militia—Revolutionary Service,’’ Magazine of American History 7, no. 6 (1881): 420–27; Frank E. Ross, ‘‘Philemon Dickinson,’’ DAB. 5: 302–3. 17. ‘‘Valerius’’ in the Philadelphia Freeman’s Journal, Dec. 25, 1782, indirectly suggests that Wharton owned land in Delaware. His brother, Thomas Wharton, owned property in Delaware in 1782. See Thomas Wharton to Mathew Fleming, Philadelphia, Apr. 11, 1782, Thomas Wharton Letter Book, 1773–1784, Wharton Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 18. Wharton was a friend of Dickinson and Read when they were students in John Moland’s Philadelphia law office. John H. Powell, ‘‘John Dickinson, Penman of the American Revolution,’’ MS. State University of Iowa, 1938, p. 118; Charles J.

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Stille, Life and Times of John Dickinson, 1732–1808 (Philadelphia, 1891), 18; Read, Read, 12. The friendship was of long duration. In 1784, Dickinson signed commissions for Wharton as justice of the peace and of the court of common pleas. Postrevolutionary Papers, 4: 46, 48. Pennsylvania State Library, Harrisburg. In 1789 Wharton appealed to Read to help him get a federal job: ‘‘I shall starve unless some appointment is gotten for me.’’ Read, Read, 471–72. 19. Receipt, New Castle, Oct. 1, 1764, Papers of the Read Family, 1735–1906, 1, Library of Congress; Journal, 1767—entries for Mar. 18, 1772, and April 27, 1773, ibid. 20. Thomas P. Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution (New York, 1937), 234–35; Read, Read, 112–14, 132–34; American State Papers, 17 [Public Land, II] (Washington, 1834), 117; Clarence W. Alvord, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics (Cleveland, 1917), 2: 94n. For Wharton’s part in western land speculations there is a voluminous literature to be consulted. The following sources were found particularly helpful: Abernethy, Western Lands; Alvord, Mississippi Valley; Kenneth P. Bailey, The Ohio Company of Virginia and the Westward Movement, 1748–1792 (Glendale, Calif., 1939); George E. Lewis, The Indiana Company, 1763–1798 (Glendale, 1941); Kate M. Rowland, The Life of George Mason, 1725–1792 (New York, 1892); Max Savelle, George Morgan, Colony Builder (New York, 1932); Albert T. Volwiler, George Croghan and the Westward Movement, 1741–1782 (Cleveland, 1926); and the Franklin Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. 21. Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Confederation (Madison, 1940), 14, 95, 114, 128, 168, and passim; J. A. Munroe, The Philadelawareans,’’ Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 69 (1945): 128–49. 22. Dickinson to Caesar Rodney, Philadelphia, May 10, 1779, Ryden, Rodney Letters, 301. 23. ‘‘All my honours in The Delaware State originated from New Castle County,’’ Dickinson explained, ‘‘though I have never yet had the happiness of residing in it.’’ Pennsylvania Journal (Philadelphia), Jan. 15, 1783. The last years of his life were, however, spent in this county and he was buried there. 24. Jensen, Articles of Confederation, 130–31. 25. See Leon de Valinger, Jr., and Virginia Shaw, eds., A Calendar of Ridgely Family Letters, 1742–1899, I (Dover, 1948); Mabel L. Ridgely, The Ridgelys of Delaware & Their Circle, What Them Befell (Portland, Me., 1949); Burton A. Konkle, Benjamin Chew, 1722–1810 (Philadelphia, 1932); J. Thomas Scharf, et al., History of Delaware, 1609– 1808 (Philadelphia, 1888), 1: 186a–202. Even an enemy of the agrarian-mercantile leaders agreed that Delaware was ‘‘specially connected with Pennsylvania by situation, commerce, and mutual exchange of friendship and intercourse,’’ Freeman’s Journal, Dec, 25, 1782. 26. Read, Read, 305. 27. These resolutions embodying the objections of Delaware to the Articles of Confederation are said to have been written by George Read. Ibid., 347–49; Minutes of Council, 371–73. 28. ‘‘New Jersey and Delaware were under the political influence of Pennsylvania, and Maryland was also a commercial colony with many interests in common. These four governments, therefore, usually stood together.’’ Abernethy, Western Lands, 170. See also Munroe, ‘‘Philadelawareans,’’ 147–48. 29. Thomas to Caesar Rodney, Wilmington, Oct. 19, 1781, Ryden, Rodney Letters, 429.

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30. Same to same, Wilmington, Feb. 9, 1782, ibid., 432–33. 31. Lee to Adams, Philadelphia, Apr. 21, 1782, Burnett, Letters, 6: 331. That there was some substance to Lee’s charge that Wharton was a British agent seems to be indicated by two letters of Wharton to David Conway, Philadelphia, Jan. 25, 1781, P. R. O. Transcripts (Library of Congress), C. O. 5: 101, pp. 367–68; Philadelphia, Jan. 26 to Feb. 9, 1781, ibid., 369–71. See Abernethy, Western Lands, 274. For Wharton’s comment on Lee, note Wharton’s letter of June 21, 1782, in Morris’s cipher No. 4, to William Temple Franklin, then in Paris with his grandfather. ‘‘Pray present my best Respects to Him [Benjamin Franklin],’’ Wharton wrote, ‘‘and mention, That I shall soon write him a long Letter, and afford Him a particular Account of Transactions here, and especially in a Society, of which He was a Member [Congress]. In the Chapter of Accidents, Three Persons, who met in Europe, are thrown together in one chamber. One of These agrees no better Than He did, with Cassius [Arthur Lee, probably] on the other Side of the Atlantic, as He (Cassius) acts exactly as He did there, which you may remember, gave Occasion to poor Richard, to say ‘If He cannot find a Quarrel wherever He goes, He will be sure to make One,’ . . . His Predilection is clearly in Favor of the Adverse Party. . . .’’ Franklin Papers, 104, Letters to William Temple Franklin, 4: 1782, p. 62. American Philosophical Society. 32. Pennsylvania Journal, Apr. 6, 1782; John H, Powell, ‘‘John Dickinson, President of the Delaware State, 1781–1782,’’ Delaware History, 1: 52–53. 33. Powell, ‘‘John Dickinson,’’ 52n. 34. Minutes of the Council, 715–17. 35. References have been found to ten such letters, of which seven are extant. Wharton also corresponded with one of the legislators, George Read. 36. Wharton to Simon Kollock, Philadelphia, June 10, 1782, Delaware Legislative Papers, Public Archives Commission, Dover. 37. Ibid.; Journals of Congress, 22: 96–100; Burnett, Letters, 6: 290n. 38. Journals of Congress, 22: 191; Lee to Samuel Adams, Philadelphia, April 21, 1782, Burnett, Letters, 6: 331. 39. Wharton to Kollock, Philadelphia, June 10, 1782, Delaware Legislative Papers. 40. Edmund Burnett, The Continental Congress (New York, 1941), 537; Wharton to Speaker of Assembly, Philadelphia, Oct. 23, 1782, and Jan. 6, 1783, Delaware Legislative Papers; Journals of Congress, 22: 224–32. 41. Journals of Congress, 22: 241; 23: 550, 553, 694. 42. Ibid., 22: 107, 108, 114, 158; Samuel Livermore to Meshech Weare, Philadelphia, March 12, 1782, Burnett, Letters, 6: 312. 43. Madison Observations on Vermont and Territorial Claims [May 1, 1782], in Burnett, Letters, 6: 340–41. 44. Madison to Edmund Pendleton, Philadelphia, Apr. 23, 1782 ibid., 336. 45. Wharton to Kollock, Philadelphia, June 10, 1782, Delaware Legislative Papers. 46. Ibid. 47. Among the Legislative Papers in the Delaware State Archives, Dover, are letters of Wharton, all from Philadelphia, to the Speaker of the Delaware House of Assembly, dated Oct. 23, 1782; Jan. 6, 15, and 16, 1783; and one to Vice-President John Cook, of Jan. 5, 1783. The letter of Jan. 6 refers to letters, not surviving, from

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Wharton to Cook (the vice-president was speaker of the upper house of the legislature, the Legislative Council) of Nov. 2 and 20, and Dec. 23, 1782. A duplicate of the letter of Jan. 6, addressed to the Council of the Delaware State, is to be found in the Autograph Collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and is largely printed in Burnett, Letters, 7: 2–5. 48. Powell, ‘‘John Dickinson,’’ 131; Wharton to George Read, Philadelphia, Nov. 10, 1782, Read, Read, 369–70; Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia), Nov. 13, 1782. 49. Minutes of Council, 766. 50. Ibid., 760–61. 51. ‘‘Perhaps your humiliation is not yet complete,’’ suggested ‘‘Valerius’’ in The Freeman’s Journal, Dec. 25, 1782; he may feel equal ‘‘to command the troops and direct the councils of two states,’’ and maybe, in time, of three. 52. Minutes of Council 205–6, 207–8. 53. Wharton to George Read, Philadelphia, Nov. 17, 1782, Read, Read, 374; James Read to George Read, Philadelphia, Sept. [Dec.] 3, 1782, ibid., 377–80. 54. Pennsylvania Gazette, Dec. 18, 1782; Pennsylvania Journal, Nov. 6, 1782; Freeman’s Journal, Jan. 29, 1783. Letter in defense of Dickinson appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal, Dec. 4, 1782, and in the Gazette, Jan. 15, 1783, while Dickinson’s own defense was sent to all the papers and began running m the Gazette, for instance, on Dec. 24, 1782. 55. Votes and Proceedings of the House of Assembly of the Delaware State for session beginning Oct. 21, 1782 (Wilmington, 1783), Jan. 14, 1783, p. 22. 56. A motion for a second reading of the resolutions failed on Jan. 23, 1783. Minutes of Council, 773. 57. On Jan. 25. Votes of Assembly, 38. 58. Journals of Congress, 23: 765. 59. James to George Read, Philadelphia Nov. 27 and [Dec.] 3, 1782, Read, Read, 375, 377–78. 60. [James Tilton], Biographical History of Dionysius, Tyrant of Delaware, by Timoleon (Philadelphia, 1788), 36–37. 61. Votes of Assembly, 45–46; Minutes of Council, 783. 62. Votes of Assembly, 47; Minutes of Council, 775, 777, 780, 784. 63. Votes of Assembly, 48. When Cook ran for sheriff in 1772, Dickinson had been urged to work against him, for Cook was said to be ‘‘the Tool and entirely supported by what is called the C[our]t P[art]y.’’ William Killen to John Dickinson, Dover, Sept. 19, 1772, Logan Papers, 12:15. The old court party was now supporting the Dickinson administration. 64. Minutes of Council, 663, 787; John Dickinson to his wife, Dover, Nov. 7, 1781, Logan Papers, 8: 83. 65. [Tilton], History of Dionysius, 27–28, 38–39; Read, Read, 49. 66. Votes of Assembly, 50; Minutes of Council, 786. 67. Minutes of Council, 788. 68. [Tilton], History of Dionysius, 39. Perhaps Tilton would have found some comfort in a comment of Walt Whitman: ‘‘(Certain universal requisites, and their settled regularity and protection, being first secured,) a nation like ours, in a sort of geological formation state, trying continually new experiments, choosing new delegations, is not served by the best men only, but sometimes more by those that provoke it—by the combats they arouse,’’ ‘‘Democratic Vistas,’’ The Complete Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman introd. by Malcolm Cowley (New York, 1948), 2: 227–28.

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69. Freeman’s Journal, Mar. 12, 1783. In the same paper ‘‘A Delaware Whig’’ had earlier (Feb. 26, 1783) rejoiced that the Whigs of Delaware were awakening. 70. A. F. Pollard, The Evolution of Parliament (London, 1920), 154. 71. Read to Van Dyke, New Castle, Mar. 25, 1786, Read, Read, 401–4; Van Dyke to Read [New Castle], April 7 1786, ibid., 404–6. 72. New Castle, Apr. 8, 1786, ibid., 411–12. 73. In the next decade Read became a Federalist, and Dickinson a DemocraticRepublican. 74. Mason had earlier argued that congressmen should be paid from the national treasury lest ‘‘the parsimony of, the States might reduce the provision so low that as had already happened in choosing delegates to Congress, the question would be not who were most fit to be chosen, but who were most willing to serve. Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention, 1: 216. Mason had been prominent in the Virginia opposition to Wharton and his land schemes. Rowland, George Mason, passim. 75. Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention, 2: 216–18, 225. 76. Ibid., 239, 590, 591, 651, 652. 77. Cf. Richard S. Rodney, ‘‘Early Relations of Delaware and Pennsylvania,’’ Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 54 (1930): 209–40.

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5 The Ins and Outs of Politics Early Nineteenth-Century Delaware In the spring of 1954 I was invited to read a paper at the annual convention of the Mississippi Valley Historical Society (now known as the Organization of American Historians), held that year in Madison, Wisconsin. I was then at work on a biography of Louis McLane (1784–1857) and was busy untangling the political history of Delaware during the years 1817–1829 when he represented this state in Congress as one of the last survivors of the nearly defunct Federalist party. The continuing vitality of a two-party political contest was a feature of Delaware politics not replicated in other states. This speech has never been published previously.

THE DETERMINANTS OF POLITICAL ACTION IN THE UNITED STATES, THE forces that move men to vote as they do, are to be understood, I think, by an examination of politics at the state level, or on a narrower basis still. These forces differ somewhat in each state, but an examination of them in any state should produce suggestions about their effectiveness and operation in other states. My remarks are drawn from the political history of Delaware in the 1820s for the obvious reason that this is the state I know best and because I believe that the party politics of Delaware in the 1820s has elements of particular and even peculiar interest to students of American political history. The peculiar feature of party politics in Delaware in the 1820s is the continuation there of the Federalist party and consequently of organized two-party strife through the one-party era in our national history. ‘‘We have lived,’’ wrote Gideon Granger, in 1819, ‘‘to see the Federalists disband as a party, and in general retire from political strife.’’ [Quoted from Fox, Decline of the Aristocracy, 219.] Such indeed had been the story in New York and Connecticut and most of the other states—but not in Delaware. In this little state of three 113

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counties the Federalists had reigned supreme since the emergence of political parties in the 1790s, and even longer, for the delegates sent by Delaware to the First Congress under the Constitution were as Federalist in their sympathies as those sent to the Fifth Congress or the Tenth. Year after year, campaign after campaign, the Delaware Federalists maintained their struggle against the Democrats, preserved their party organization, and generally commanded the allegiance of Delaware till they became the equally victorious Adams party of 1828 and the Clay party of 1832. Thereafter, with a change of name, this party continued to rule Delaware to the middle of the nineteenth century. Occasionally the Democratic opposition was able to elect a governor or a representative to Congress, but almost never were they able to gain control of Delaware by electing both a governor and a majority of the General Assembly. Even the War of 1812 had not helped the Democrats. On the contrary it had strengthened the Federalists, who took credit for the spectacular victories of the navy, ‘‘Herculean child of Federal policy,’’ as they called it, and for the consummation of peace. They toasted the triumphs on the sea of Delawareans, of Thomas Macdonough at Plattsburg, of Jacob Jones, whose Wasp stung the Frolic, and the triumphs at the council table of James Bayard, who went to Ghent with Gallatin, Clay, Adams, and Russell. For all that went wrong with the war, for the British invasion of the Chesapeake, for the weak defenses of the Delaware coastline—and all Delaware is coastline—the Republicans were blamed. For the Hartford Convention, Delaware Federalists expressed nothing but scorn; they retired behind the heroic figures of Macdonough, Jones, and Bayard, whenever taunts arose about Hartford and the Connecticut blue lights. There was no treason or secession sentiment in Delaware, they said. The Republicans had plunged the country into war, but the Federalist navy had preserved freedom and the Federalist Bayard had made peace. At the beginning of the 1820s, however, the Delaware Federalists did experience some defeats. In 1820, the Democrats elected a governor; in 1821 the Democrats won the lower house of the legislature; in 1822 the Democrats elected both a governor and a majority in both houses of the legislature. This was a great reversal indeed for the Federalists; perhaps their party was now doomed to oblivion in Delaware as elsewhere. But even in the midst of the defeat of 1822, the Federalists elected their candidates to Congress. And in 1823

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they charged back into power, regaining control of the legislature and electing a governor to replace the deceased Democrat. Thereafter, through the 1820s and beyond, the Federalists were almost undefeated, Their name changed; they became the Federal Republicans, the National Republicans, the Whigs, but the party remained essentially intact. Consequently an analysis of the determinants of political action in Delaware in the 1820s involves the question of why Delaware voters supported the Federalist party with a consistency unknown elsewhere in the union. The answer to this question raises a second question: how was it that the stronghold of Delaware Federalism was the most rural, most agricultural part of a rural, agricultural state—for unlike the two downstate counties, the northern county, New Castle, the county that was most nearly urban in its culture, had early been captured by the Democrats. Some part of the answer, some of the forces determining political action in Delaware pre-date the 1820s. For by this decade Delaware federalism was an historical fact, a cultural inheritance that Delawareans could not or did not shrug off. Geography, economics, the national origins of the people, and their religion were all factors that had spawned and to some extent strengthened the federalism of Delaware. The geographic bounds of Delaware were so limited that Delaware had no frontier, no great newly settled or unsettled area that might breed a Jeffersonian agrarianism, a protest against tidewater domination. Delaware was all tidewater. Delaware had, moreover, no large city, no metropolis where a large urban proletariat could be roused to call for and vote for reforms in the old order. The largest town in Delaware, Wilmington, was the citadel of Delaware democracy, but it was too small, its voters too few to carry the state. By the peculiarities of geography, Delaware lay near but not upon the great routes of transportation. Peninsular Delaware was bypassed by travelers who went by sea. Travelers by land crossed the narrow neck of Delaware, in New Castle County only, the one Democratic area of the state. Consequently, whatever cultural baggage littered the path of man’s travel came to but one part of Delaware. Two of the three counties were away from the high roads running north-south and east-west. Sand barred the edge of the ocean; marsh shored the side of the bay. Sand and marsh and the absence of any extensive hinterland westward prevented the growth of any oceanic port in lower Delaware; no Manhattan lay in the Delaware Bay. North on the river fast-

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land appeared, and there the ports developed—two, New Castle and Wilmington, in Delaware’s Democratic county, and a greater port, Philadelphia, beyond. Without ports, most of Delaware received no direct immigration from overseas but only those migrants who were filtered down from Philadelphia and northern Delaware or moved eastward from the Chesapeake. Geographically, then, there was little basis in the 1820s for the rise in Delaware of a strong party of protest or for any great challenge to the existing order of politics. The geographic bases of political action merge with the economic. The longest side of Delaware is its shoreline, its eastern front, which lies against the Atlantic Ocean, the Delaware Bay, and the Delaware River. It is of first importance to an understanding of affairs in days when commerce moved mainly by water to note that most of the streams of Delaware, the little rivers and creeks, flow eastward into this ocean, this bay, and this river. Out of shallow and winding creeks the farm products of Delaware were borne from the landings into the commercial world of the Delaware River Valley and of its market capital, Philadelphia. Thus Delaware, like West Jersey, became Philadelphia-oriented. The Delaware farmer was the partner of the Philadelphia merchant and sent his son to the Philadelphia counting house or law office or medical school or on his ships to sea. The interrelationship bred similarity of outlook, a community of interest. Delawareans defended Biddle’s bank and Pennsylvania’s tariff. Delaware Federalism was strengthened on the whole by this contact, particularly since it was a contact with the mercantile part of Philadelphia, the Hamiltonian element therein. Reflect upon its strength and its perseverance that in 1941 a Philadelphia editor feels he is breaking with his class when he praises Jefferson: ‘‘I cannot resist saying, because I know it will annoy a number of my friends, that it is my opinion, politics notwithstanding, that Jefferson was one of the greatest men this country ever produced.’’ [Frederic R. Kirkland, Letters on the American Revolution, vol. 1 (Phila., 1941), 93]. ‘‘Politics notwithstanding,’’ he wrote. But politics could not be put aside in the Delaware contact with Philadelphia. This metropolis was the Delawarean’s window to the world and his political actions must have been affected by his economic and cultural connections. National backgrounds and religion also had a great deal to do with the political action of Delawareans. Most of the white people— the colored had no political power—were of English descent, Epis-

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copalians or Methodists. But in the northern county, farther from the sea but closer to the world, a 1arge proportion of the people were Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. They had come in the eighteenth century, whereas the English were largely of a seventeenth-century migration to America, if not to Delaware. Between the two grew the natural rivalry between the old settler and the newcomer, a rivalry that religious differences made more severe. Literate and industrious, the Scotch-Irish prospered in Delaware, though they often began as humble redemptioners. But literacy and industry intensified the conflict, for the Scotch-Irish sought to rise politically as well as economically. With them to the New World, they had. brought a heritage of hate for the English crown and its Hanoverian usurpers. They became the bulwark of the revolutionary movement in Delaware, and as rebels they challenged not only the English crown overseas but the order established by English settlers in America. In Delaware, they supported Jefferson’s party and sought to wrest political power and office from the dominant English faction. The Irish party, the Presbyterian party, was the Democratic party; the Church party was the Federalist party. One of the firm bases of Federalist strength was the political union of Episcopalians and Methodists, of the town church and the country chapel. The Methodists had become by 1800 the largest denomination in Delaware; even today Delaware is the most Methodist state. Although Methodism had grown in Delaware through its appeal to the rural, unchurched Anglicans, the Methodist movement had proceeded in Delaware without engendering anything like the degree of ill feeling that arose elsewhere between Anglicans, or Episcopalians, and Methodists. There had never been enough Anglican priests in Delaware to minister to a rural, scattered people. Methodist preachers had come to Delaware from an English and an Anglican background to supplement the work of the colonial clergy, and the latter in many cases cheered them on. Though complete schism occurred finally, the early cooperative spirit of priest and preacher was not wholly lost and a community of interest was maintained between members of these two churches of English origin. Charges of irreligion and drunkenness were hurled at Delaware candidates by both sides in an attempt to sway the Methodist vote. Federalists satirized the Democrats as drunkards and sang, to the tune of Yankee Doodle:

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Election time is coming on, Let us look about, sirs, To make a firm and noble stand, Let democrats turn out, sirs. Yankee doodle, keep it up, Yankee doodle dandy. Let us try another cup, Damn it, where’s the brandy.

Since many Episcopalians and Methodists had remained loyal to England in the war, the Federalists were often taunted as Tories. The same song made light of this argument. We may repeat it o’er again, Although a hackney’d story, Because he’s Federal, sure ’tis plain, He must have been a Tory. [Delaware Gazette, Oct. l, 1822.]

Because the Irish immigrants were likely to vote Democrat, Federalist assemblymen had passed a law requiring every immigrant to show his naturalization certificate before voting, and providing a $100 fine for an unqualified alien who attempted to vote and a $500 fine for the election inspector who accepted the vote of an unnaturalized alien. The laws, of course, were intended to force locally chosen election inspectors in Democratic New Castle County to refuse immigrant votes unless absolute proof of naturalization existed. [Laws, 5: 44–46, 49–50 (Feb. 15, 1814): Delaware Gazette, Apr. 19, May 2, 1814.] All of these factors involved a certain amount of sectionalism. The two most distinct Delaware sections were the upstate area, New Castle County, which was the more urban and industrial area, the area of more diversified population elements; and the downstate area, the rural and agricultural coastal plain, Kent and Sussex counties, dominated by farmers of English descent. The former area was Democratic; the latter Federalist. When the Democrats enjoyed in 1823 their rare opportunity to manage the state, they almost succeeded in moving the capital from Dover, downstate, to Wilmington, upstate. The very attempt was extremely impolitic, for the three counties were then nearly equal in population and exactly equal in legislative representation. Since two of the three were downstate, the Democrats were unnecessarily affronting the bulk of the electorate.

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An opportunistic approach to Delaware sectionalism was frequently employed by both political parties when they chose their candidates for high office from the areas and groups in which they were weakest. Thus the Democrats, strong in upstate Delaware and with Scottish and urban groups, met their greatest success with candidates like Caesar A. Rodney and Joseph Haslet who lived or had family connections downstate and were sure to attract a certain number of normally Federalist votes from among their old friends and neighbors. After Rodney had served several terms in the House of Representatives, he was elected to the Senate in 1822, whereupon his brother-in-law wrote him, ‘‘You are the first democratic Senator, ever elected into the Senate of the U. States from Delaware. The circumstance is notable, as the government has now been organized nearly about one third of a century.’’ [John Fisher to Rodney, Dover, Jan. 11, 1822, HSD.] The Federalists played the same game. Their most popular candidate in the 1820s was Louis McLane, a lawyer of Wilmington, the Democrat citadel, who had once owned a mill on the Brandywine and who bore a Scottish name, though reared as a Methodist. McLane could be counted on to cut into the Democrat majority in upstate Delaware sufficiently to coast to victory on the Federalist pluralities downstate. Newspaper verse demonstrates the Federalist attempt to win otherwise Republican voters to McLane, as in the case of these lines, addressed ‘‘To Naturalized Irishmen’’: . . . may our offspring, proud of their behest, Keep freedom’s altar—ever in the west, Support the laws of this our fertile state, Whose Sons are wise, and statesmen truly great— Wise for they choose those only fit to guide, The boast of Delaware, their country’s pride; While thus they act, give them your vote and voice And hail M’Lane—the people’s friend and choice. [Delaware Gazette, Oct. 1, 1822.)

Rodney, Haslet, and McLane could also be counted on to win many votes throughout the state because of the historical—that is, Revolutionary—prestige of the names they bore. Rodney was the nephew, namesake, and heir of Delaware’s revered war governor and signer. Haslet was the son of Delaware’s most prominent soldiermartyr of the Revolution. McLane was the son of the captain of a dashing Revolutionary partisan band.

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The family relationships of Delawareans were so important that the historian must be something of a genealogist to understand all the possible friendly and unfriendly coalitions that kinship might generate. The representatives elected to Congress from Delaware in the 1820s were, besides McLane and Caesar A. Rodney, Daniel Rodney and Kensey Johns, Jr. Johns was the son of a chief justice; Daniel Rodney the distant cousin of Caesar. The senators, again excepting McLane and Caesar A. Rodney, were Nicholas Van Dyke, Thomas Clayton, Henry M. Ridgely, and John M. Clayton. Van Dyke and Thomas Clayton were the sons of governors of Delaware; John M. Clayton was a cousin of Thomas Clayton; Ridgely was the son of a very prominent Kent County legislator and his grandfather had been guardian of Caesar Rodney, the signer. In-law relationships were almost as important as those in blood. Representative Johns was the brother-in-law of Senator Van Dyke. McLane’s political fortunes were helped by the fact that his brother had married a daughter of George Read, of New Castle, a leading political figure there. These relationships were not always of assistance to politicians; sometimes political opposition became even more severe when two members of a family joined opposing parties, as in the case of McLane and his brother-in-law, Representative John Milligan. Another type of relationship that had political potency but is unknown to the genealogist is the close tie between the lawyer and his student-clerk. George Read’s Federalism was adopted by Kensey Johns and passed on by him to Nicholas Van Dyke. Louis McLane read law with the first Senator James Bayard and in turn tutored the second Senator James Bayard in law and politics. Federalist law offices produced Federalist lawyers just as Federalist fathers produced Federalist sons. Such personal relationships existed and exerted power at the bottom as well as at the top rungs of the political ladder. Assemblymen, sheriffs, and coroners had fathers, brothers, sons, and cousins, even as governors and congressmen did. Whereas a congressman’s brother-in-law might wish to be a judge, a sheriff ’s brother-in-law could be just as eager to become a lighthouse keeper. A basic factor in Delaware politics was the quest for office, and for whatever power, prestige, and profits success in this quest might bring. Eternal warfare raged between the ins and the outs, the haves and have-nots of political office. Such a motivation kept a minority of Democrats struggling against a majority of Federalists, even when

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all other issues between the parties seemed to have disappeared. It served not only to keep a minority party alive; it continually threatened a majority party with dissension leading to schism. In 1816, for example, the Federalist state convention refused to renominate Thomas Clayton for Congress. To justify himself and his county of Kent; which, he said, had not received its share of state offices, Clayton ran as an independent and diverted sufficient Federalist votes to permit some unusual Democratic victories. Clayton was soon welcomed back to his party, but the ill-feeling resultant from this election was a factor in Delaware Federalism for the next decade. Other Federalists, unlike Clayton, made open shift of their party allegiance as they saw Democrats victorious through all the nation. ‘‘Look upon the democratic ticket,’’ a Delaware Federalist told members of his party, ‘‘to see how many men are now figuring there, who lately played their part in our own ranks, and are yet raw recruits in the ranks of our opponents. It would seem indeed as if the contest now was, which party should place the greater number of Federalists in office. . . .’’ [‘‘A’’ in Delaware Gazette, Sept. 12, 1818.] When the Democrats became the majority party, by the election of 1822, they succumbed to a similar schism. Both seats in the United States Senate fell vacant and a battle royal ensued in a party long starved for such offices. The result was no choice at all; the vacancies were unfilled; the Democrats, split by the quarrel, lost the next election, and waited a quarter of a century before having another chance to elect a senator. Back in power, the Federalists soon faced similar problems. Of the presidential election in 1824 Louis McLane declared, ‘‘May God preserve me from a choice between Adams and Jackson.’’ But before the election of 1828 he became an ardent Jacksonite, probably because he felt a Delaware federalist might rise to power with the hero of New Orleans, as earlier Federalists had risen with the hero of Trenton, Princeton, and Yorktown. McLane tried, consequently, to construct a Jackson party in Delaware out of his following among the Federalists and from friendly Democrats. But the Clayton faction, led by Thomas Clayton’s astute young cousin John Middleton Clayton, were too much for him. When the election of 1828 was over, it was evident that the Jacksonian party in Delaware had only the support of the old Jeffersonian minority; the Federalist majority was now the Adams-Clay party. McLane’s effort had backfired; he had exchanged a position of leadership in a majority party for leadership

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in a minority. McLane, wrote a Washington friend, ‘‘has staked everything on his political measures, his practice injured, his popularity in his own state gone. . . . Jackson’s election affords him something more than mere triumph. I have no doubt he builds on it hope, nay, almost certainty of office.’’ [Margaret Bayard Smith, First 40 Years of Washington Society (N.Y., 1906), 251.] McLane’s hope of office now rested with the national administration; in Delaware, hope, nay, certainty of office rested with the Federalists. Favored initially by factors such as geography, economics, national origins, and religion, the Federalists of Delaware exploited family relationships and ambition for office so as to retain power decade after decade. In matters of party organization and legislation, they were sufficiently adaptable to remain popular. Whereas Democrats introduced the practice of choosing delegates to a state nominating convention at county mass meetings, the Federalists soon did likewise. When Democrats replaced the county mass meeting by a convention of delegates chosen in the hundreds, the Federalists were quick to copy. When Democrats from the one urban county sought turnpike laws, banking laws, school laws, Federalist legislators eventually gave them what they wanted. Federalists continued to rule Delaware because they expressed the popular will, consciously or unconsciously—because their dominance was based on their broad popularity. In a state where change was never convulsive, an elastic, representative leadership might continue in power indefinitely. ‘‘The people of Delaware do not change suddenly,’’ wrote Stephen Pleasonton, a Washington civil servant (but native of Delaware), in 1828; ‘‘they are a steady thinking people, and take great pride in maintaining their opinions. . . .’’ [To Thomas M. Rodney, Washington, Oct. 10, 1828, Brown Collection, HSD.]

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6 The Delaware Physician of 1800 Having been asked to speak at a meeting of the Delaware Academy of Medicine in Wilmington on May 3, 1955, I chose as my subject ‘‘The Delaware Physician of 1800.’’ Later my speech was published in the Delaware State Medical Journal for October 1955 (vol. 27, no. 10, pp. 255–61). Both the audience for the speech and the circulation of the journal were largely restricted to doctors, and consequently this essay is not widely known, even by enthusiasts for Delaware history.

THE PHYSICIAN IN DELAWARE ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO OCCUpied a somewhat different place in our society from that which he occupies today. He was, for instance, the one trained scientist in the community. In Wilmington today the doctors of medicine are surrounded by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other trained scientists, doctors of philosophy in chemistry and physics, masters and bachelors of arts and sciences—probably more here than in any city of similar size in America. But in 1800 this was not so, and the physician was the one scientist in the community, the one person upon whom people might call for information on scientific problems. In the 1780s, for example, when the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture chose a man in each state to help it answer a group of forty-four queries on American agriculture that were submitted by a French scholar (and physician), its choice in Delaware was quite naturally a physician. A physician’s scientific training equipped him to observe and to measure accurately, and so it was to Dr. James Tilton, who was soon to become first president of the Medical Society of Delaware, that the Agriculture Society turned for an accurate report on the state of Delaware agriculture. Since he was the only one of the society’s correspondents who answered these forty-four queries, his notes on the state of agriculture in 1788 have a unique value. The physician was not only the one trained scientist in the Dela123

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ware town of one hundred and fifty years ago; he was one of the very few educated men. Some ministers and lawyers, but few others, had had as much schooling as the physician; therefore he was called upon for many services besides his professional chores. Dr. John Vaughan, for instance, edited a newspaper in Wilmington, and Matthew Wilson, besides practicing medicine, was a parson and a schoolteacher in Lewes. Physicians were prominent among the trustees of all of the early academies, the early secondary schools of Delaware. Because the physician was an educated man in a society where formal education was respected but uncommon, he was a natural leader in his community and his state. He had more time for civic chores, of course, than does the physician today, partly because of the state of transportation and communication. The physician of 1800 was geographically limited in his practice by poor roads and slow horses. The towns were small and often had more resident physicians then than now. Nor could the physician’s hours of retirement be interrupted by a telephone. Even if he sought to spend his leisure in professional reading, medical literature was neither so vast nor so accessible that it would occupy him for long. Perhaps these facts led him to more varied enterprises than his modern successor finds time for. At any rate, it is demonstrable that the early physician of Delaware was an active leader in his state. Our first president—such was the title of our chief executive immediately after independence was claimed—was a Wilmington physician, John McKinly. Our last president and first governor (the title was changed by the constitution of 1792) was a physician from near Middletown, Joshua Clayton. Clayton became a United States senator in 1798, and his Delaware colleague then was another physician, Henry Latimer, of Newport. A year earlier, Dr. Nicholas Way, of Wilmington, had died in Philadelphia, where he was director of the United States Mint by appointment of President Washington. James Tilton had been a member of Congress and was, like John Vaughan, a prominent figure in the Jeffersonian party. Twenty-five years earlier Dr. Charles Ridgely had been a prominent legislator and a party leader in Kent. John Haslet, another Kent physician, commanded the Delaware regiment in the Revolution and by his death at the Battle of Princeton, became our most famous martyr of that war. The physicians of Delaware, as a class, came from families of at least modest prosperity. Well-to-do parents were almost essential, because the training of a physician was costly in both time and money.

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Poor boys did, of course, become physicians, but they were the exceptions rather than the rule. Dr. Nicholas Way’s mother, we know, kept a school in Wilmington, and another mother’s efforts are suggested in a letter of recommendation, October 17, 1766, from Matthew Wilson, of Lewes, to Dr. Charles Ridgely, of Dover: ‘‘As I understand you want an Apprentice at this time, I cannot but recommend Mr. James Rench. . . . His mother has, tho’ with difficulty, kept him at learning until he has read Juvenal and also Lucian, under a very careful and correct Teacher, so that he must now be well grounded in the Latin and Greek Languages. I doubt not he will be Teachable, complaisant and careful of your business. I doubt not . . . you will make the terms as easy as possible. I would gladly have taken him, but have too many at present.’’ As this letter indicates, apprenticeship was a common form of vocational education in the eighteenth century in medicine as in other ‘‘arts and mysteries.’’ Formal training, through lectures and demonstrations, did exist but was for the few rather than for the many. Of those who studied medicine in school, a great number went abroad, primarily to Edinburgh, and later to London and Paris. The chief resort for those who were schooled in medicine at home was the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania), where, in 1768, the first class in medicine ever to be graduated from an American college included two Delawareans, James Tilton and Nicholas Way. The degree that they received was, of course, a bachelor’s degree, bachelor of medicine, or, they said, of ‘‘physick.’’ Three years after graduation, a successful practitioner could secure the doctorate by presenting an acceptable thesis to the medical faculty. But for most of Delaware’s aspiring physicians, it was not school at Edinburgh or Philadelphia, but apprenticeship, perhaps in Philadelphia, or in Wilmington, Dover, or elsewhere, that was the pathway to the practice of medicine. Sometimes this was a formal apprenticeship with terms of indenture carefully drawn and the young man ‘‘bound’’ thereto as if to an artisan’s trade, but usually the relationship seems to have been more informal, though of course a fee was customarily paid by the student for the privilege of learning the professional mysteries. Too little is known of the Delaware apprentice’s daily routine, but we do have a few glimpses of his life. We have, for instance, the report of a lecture that Dr. James Tilton gave in Dover in 1770 for the benefit of his apprentices. Thomas Rodney, the younger brother of Caesar, visited the class and de-

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scribes the occasion in his diary, under the date of Saturday, November 10, 1770 [I have modernized punctuation and capitalization, but not spelling]: Doctr. Tilton having a good subject for desection, gave me an invitation to go and see him perform. I went accordingly. The first part of his performance was a short lecture on the human frame, whereby he gave a general acct. of the body, describing only its larger or common divisions. He then proceeded to desect, beginning with making an incision or long gash from the waist up to the breast, cutting in ’till he came to the muscular parts. He then parted the skin and membrane, down the left side & lay’d bare what he call’d the oblique decending mussel or mussels. He then peal’d off that mussel, and lay’d bare what he call’d the oblique ascending mussel or mussels, which seem to take their rise near the hips and back-bone, and tend up towards the line of the belly, being nearly at [right] angles with the oblique descending mussels, which take rise at the shoulder and back-bone and tend downwards to the rimm of the belly. The two mussels lie one over or (if you please) under the other, each spreadg. over all that side of the belly. He then lay’d bare a mussel, which tends from the breast down to the waist and about 3 in. wide. This mussel seems to be exceedingly curious; it is in a manner divided into 4 parts by a kind of membrane suted to that purpose, which makes it very strong and able to support the belly. If it was not for those divisions, this mussel wou’d be so weak by reason of its length that it wou’d not be able to perform its office. The doctr. then lay’d bare what he call’d the transverse direct mussel which takes rise along the back bone & tends directly round to the line of the belly in a horizontal position, passing under the two mussels first men[tione]d. He then took out the bowels, but it being late he did not describe any of the internal parts, otherwise than to run over their names to the young students.

At the time of this lecture Tilton was but two years out of college, but, probably from the very fact that he had gone to college, his practice must have begun particularly auspiciously since he attracted students so soon. Nathaniel Luff, another Kent County lad, had no such easy time getting started. From an autobiography that Luff wrote for the benefit of his descendants, we know that he studied medicine with ‘‘a distant relation,’’ Dr. George Glentworth, in Philadelphia and began his practice somewhere on the road between Lewes and Dover. He rented part of a house and stable room for a horse, plus privileges for a servant, a Negro boy, and he made arrangements, being a bachelor, to board with Edward Fisher. Because

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he had a juvenile appearance, Luff sought ‘‘both in dress and address’’ to seem brilliant. Aided by family influence, he soon had a large practice, but it did not last. After some years he moved to Frederica and enjoyed a large practice again, but again it dwindled, partly, according to Luff, because his patients got well and partly because his second patient died of the fever. Unsuccessfulness in the practice of physic, declared Luff, ‘‘however judicious the prescriptions, or peculiar the circumstances of the patient, tends to lessen the reputation of the practitioner, while recovery, under medical hands, however inadverted, multiplies his practice.’’ If Luff found it hard to keep his patients, there were other physicians who had difficulty in decreasing their practice—and a country practice then as now was often very strenuous. Dr. Nicholas Way broke his leg in a fall from his horse and decided he must relinquish his country practice because of the ‘‘inconvenience of riding.’’ However, ‘‘his patients were unwilling to yield, and this was so perplexing he knew not how to limit his visits.’’ His wisest step, he determined, was to move away from his practice, and so he did. He moved to Philadelphia and accepted appointment as director of the mint. Many physicians who had otherwise good practices found it difficult to collect a proper compensation for their services. Like ill health, ill compensation drove men from the profession. In March 1801, Thomas Mendenhall, a Democratic politician in Wilmington, wrote the newly inaugurated Jefferson to beg a $600 political appointment for his friend and fellow Democrat, Dr. John Vaughan. ‘‘He is at present in a handsome run of practice for this place,’’ Mendenhall explained to Jefferson; ‘‘yet you know doctors’ bills are slowly paid.’’ Nathaniel Luff, who seems to have experienced every problem except continued prosperity, told of his troubles at Frederica in 1800. Three doctors were then inoculating there against smallpox. (Is there a single physician in Frederica today?) ‘‘I used very little solicitation,’’ wrote Luff, ‘‘but inoculated when called on. Generally the poorest and least likely to pay are anxious to have it, while the more opulent are very careful and cautious, and very desirous to reduce the price.’’ He got the least part of the practice. ‘‘Some,’’ he added, bitterly, ‘‘have undertaken inoculation for less than the general stated price.’’ Luff ’s bitterness of feeling against his colleagues in Frederica was but symptomatic of other and more serious quarrels of physicians.

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On several occasions these quarrels became public; as when Dr. John Vaughan wrote letters for a Wilmington newspaper in 1799 in which he demanded the erection of a lazaretto for the ventilation of infected goods on ships arriving from fever-stricken ports. A sloop, he declared, was then unloading from Havana, where fever raged; obviously stricter quarantine laws were needed. Vaughan’s letters were taken as a personal affront by the Wilmington health officer, Dr. Ebenezer Smith, who had been aboard the sloop Vaughan mentioned. In a rebuttal, Smith attempted to quiet Vaughan by ridicule, beginning his letter, ‘‘Although I have not come so recently from school as yourself, and perhaps have not as much leisure to write. . . .’’ While physicians quarreled, laymen presumed to advise on matters of health. ‘‘Have so much regard for your health,’’ Thomas Rodney wrote his daughter, ‘‘as not to lace your stays too tight. Your lungs are weak and may be injured by it.’’ Other advice came from itinerant practitioners of extravagant claims, like Dr. Bignall, who arrived in Wilmington in 1808, lately from Europe, he advertised, and a former student at Edinburgh. His specialty was the pharmacy of vegetables, by which he promised remarkable cures—of choleric and liver complaints, for example, which affected the lungs and often led to consumption. ‘‘Cancers, bruises, inflammations, particularly of the eyes and long standing, ulcers, if curable’’—all these he undertook to treat. To the ladies he offered ‘‘a vegetable liquid and tooth powder unparalleled in this or any other country,’’ which destroyed scurvy, prevented bad breath, and preserved the gums and teeth. There were also itinerant dentists, like ‘‘Dr. John Dyott, professional dentist, from London,’’ who announced in a Wilmington paper of 1809 that he would spend a few days at Brinton’s tavern, ‘‘where,’’ his advertisement ran, ‘‘he performs every operation upon TEETH; cures the Tooth-Ache, and the scurvy in the gums, be it ever so inveterate; fastens loose Teeth by making the gums grow firm up to them; renders Teeth white and beautiful; prevents their decay; keeps such as are so from becoming worse; fills up those that are hollow . . . ; extracts teeth and stumps with ease; transplants teeth; makes and fixes artificial teeth in various ways; and regulates the teeth in children.’’ Dyott declared he had had an extensive practice in London and in other parts of Europe. He would, if requested, wait on any lady or gentleman at his home. A rarer note is the advertisement of Miss Grace Milligan in 1789,

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declaring she had come to Wilmington to practice midwifery after having studied for over a year in Philadelphia with Dr. William Shippen, from whom she bore a recommendation. The particular significance of this announcement is that Dr. Shippen was the first man in America to lecture to midwives, and thus it reveals the expansion to Delaware of the benefits of Shippen’s discussion of a hitherto secretive subject. In the same year, another rare note appeared in a Wilmington newspaper. Drs. Capelle and Smith, the paper declared, had operated ‘‘for the strangulated hernia, or rupture, . . . on a servant man of Solomon Hersey, on Red Clay Creek.’’ The newsworthy fact about the operation, apparently, was not so much that it was successful, but that the patient made a very rapid recovery—he was able to walk in ten days. This news, the editor felt, should encourage those who dread the operation for ‘‘a complaint many fall a sacrifice to.’’ The note itself testifies to the improvement of surgery—an event that should be expected where young physicians like Tilton were giving demonstrations in dissection to their pupils. This, too, was the time when patent medicines were just coming into popularity. At a newspaper office in Wilmington, one could buy ‘‘McCarty’s Indian Tooth Ache Drops’’ for seventy-five cents a bottle. Mathew R. Lockerman, in 1807, declared that he handled all of the patent medicines manufactured by Richard Lee & Son, of Baltimore, including Lee’s Anti-Bilious Pills, good for seasickness, headaches, change of climate, and an appetizer (‘‘a dose never fails to remove a cold if taken on its first appearance’’) ; Lee’s Genuine Essence and Extract of Mustard, good for rheumatism, gout, palsy, lumbago, white swellings, chilblains, sprains, bruises, and pains generally; Lee’s Elixir, for colds, coughs, asthma, sore throats, whooping cough, and ‘‘approaching consumption’’; Lee’s Infallible Ague and Fever Drops, Lee’s Worm-Destroying Lozinges; Lee’s Grand Restorative; Lee’s Sovereign Ointment for the Itch (‘‘may be used by pregnant women’’); Lee’s Eye-Water; Lee’s Corn Plaister; Lee’s Damask Lip Salve; Lee’s Genuine Persian Lotion (prevents blemishes); and Lee’s Anodyne Elixir. With such remedies at hand, many citizens probably found appeals to a physician unnecessary. Yet every season of every year brought new challenges to the physicians of Delaware. One of them, Dr. John Vaughan, compiled in the year 1803 a medical register, as he called it, detailing the seasonal ills of Wilmington. The winter of 1803, he wrote, was a healthy one, with no pestilential diseases after the first appearance of ice. In

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March ‘‘influenza appeared in a moderate degree—most severe in elderly persons, in infants & valetudinarians.’’ The disease continued into April, when ‘‘convulsions were frequent in the occasional febrile disorders of children’’ and there were also a few cases of scarlatina. In May the diseases were of a mixed character, with some cases of influenza and of scarlatina anginosa. Vaccination and inoculation were both going on, Vaughan noted, but ‘‘the latter . . . generally gave place to the former, and will no doubt in time surmount all opposition.’’ June, ‘‘usually our healthiest month,’’ saw ‘‘a number of cases of diarrhea . . . and a few cases of vesicular eruption.’’ July brought many diseases: chicken pox, ‘‘frequent colics in adults, and a few cases of cholera.’’ ‘‘Diarrhea was general and some cases dysenterical. The adjacent country was especially affected with the dysenterical form of fever; and it appeared . . . to have pervaded the whole of the peninsula.’’ The diseases of July continued into August, when ‘‘dysentery became more formidable and scattering cases of fever chequered the scene . . . After the heavy rains in the middle of August the dysentery gave place to fever of different forms.’’ ‘‘Our disease was stationary during the remainder of the autumn . . . Typhus fever became more general during September and continued with little difference in degree throughout October.’’ In summing up, Vaughan declared the spring diseases were not unusual in frequency or form, but that intestinal disorders had occurred earlier and more severely than usual. He believed dysentery was not contagious, but the public thought differently, and ‘‘the unconquerable horrors of contagion added to a general ignorance of nursing, not only embarrass the physician in the execution of his wishes, but obstinately conspire against the life of the patient.’’ Perhaps the damage to crops by a May frost and a June drought had influenced the history of diseases, he suggested—for example, by causing people to eat fruits they would otherwise have discarded. He also speculated on the effect on health, particularly on the frequency of agues, of the clearing of timber from the land, and of the erection of ‘‘numerous dams for water works of various kinds.’’ Another local physician, James Tilton, has left us a survey of the climates and diseases of Delaware, an essay he prepared in 1790 for the president of the Philadelphia College of Physicians. ‘‘The hills of Brandywine and Christiana,’’ Tilton asserted, ‘‘furnish as healthful a district of country as any in America. The Borough of Wilmington for health, beauty, and accommodation, is superior to any town I have seen.’’

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He had no such kind words for his native county: ‘‘Kent, though blessed with the most fertile soil, is the most sickly of the three counties. Dover . . . is truly unhealthful. Situated eight miles within land, and shut out from all water communication by high timbered woods, the air of this district, in the hot season of the year, suffers exceedingly from stagnation.’’ In Sussex, Lewes won particular compliments from Tilton: ‘‘Lewes . . . is constantly fanned from the ocean and is as healthful as Bermudas. This place has furnished the longest lived inhabitants of our state . . . Lewes is much resorted to by convalescents from the inland country and neighboring states. . . . Sickly boys and others with swelled spleens and obstructed viscera from repeated and obstinate fevers are quickly restored to health, barely by a residence at Lewes. All manner of nervous weakness is relieved by the salutary air of our Cape; but asthmatic and hectic patients should be cautious how they trust themselves there.’’ Dr. Tilton, like Dr. John Vaughan, noted changes in the diseases— ‘‘a great change has taken place in the diseases of this part of the country,’’ declared Tilton—and explained that local physicians had had to change their methods of treatment too. Before the Revolution, fevers were treated by repeated bleeding, ‘‘but the same method now would be attended with very different effects; the exceptions at least are so few as hardly to deserve mentioning. Opium, wine, bark, volatile salts, are the articles of materia medica we are obliged chiefly to have recourse to. . . . We have learned from repeated observation to withhold the lancet, or to use it in the most guarded manner. It is noteworthy that Tilton, whom we have previously seen giving an anatomical lecture to his apprentices, is here disclosing the results of repeated observation. It is not only a tribute to him but to his training—it has previously been noted that he was in the first class to take medical degrees in the English colonies—that he has learned the value of observation. Tilton was, of course, outstanding among the physicians of his time. He was offered the chair of materia medica at the University of Pennsylvania; he became surgeongeneral of the American army in the War of 1812. Nathaniel Luff, on the other hand, was certainly a much less successful Delaware physician, but for that very reason a quotation from Luff should be balanced against one from Tilton for a truer approximation of the Delaware medical scene.

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Let Luff, then, serve to picture the fear of the ‘‘noxious vapors’’ exhaled by the wooded and marshy lowlands of Delaware: ‘‘During our passing the forests,’’ he wrote in 1798, ‘‘I frequently chewed camphire and smelt of it, as I passed stagnant pools and ponds, or low sunken grounds, that emitted a nauseous and disagreeable stench, and rubbed my hands frequently with the camphire, avoided much fruit or whatever tended to relax the stomach, as cucumbers, melons, etc., but refrained from spirituous liquors, not that I do not in a medicinal way esteem them salutary, but because of the excessive abuse of them, fearing lest by using them (in what is first called moderation) I may be led on to excess.’’ To appreciate Luff ’s fear, one must recall that 1798, the year in which he wrote the above passage, was the year of the dread yellow fever’s arrival in Delaware. The fever had come to Philadelphia in 1793—its arrival there is graphically recounted in John Powell’s book, Bring Out Your Dead—but it did not reach Wilmington that year nor in the years of its recurrent visits to Philadelphia until 1798. Then it struck Wilmington disastrously. How it was caused, how it was carried, these were the great mysteries that baffled the physicians. All sorts of hypotheses were set up, but certain points seemed clear. ‘‘Every physician of this place,’’ Dr. Tilton wrote from Wilmington to Dr. Currie, of Philadelphia, ‘‘agree[s] that the disease was imported to us from Philadelphia, by infected goods and furniture, as well as infected persons. We suppose the disease to be propagated by contagion from infected persons, clothing, vessels, houses, etc. It is remarkable . . . that stronger exhalations arise from persons affected by this fever, than in other febrile diseases; and we have reason to believe that many were affected by the contagion at a distance from the sick reaching quite across our streets.’’ To Tilton it was evident that ‘‘infected household goods and furniture, brought from the city [Philadelphia] by our shallops had more influence in spreading the contagion than diseased persons; for it was very remarkable that the disease was not communicated from the first person who died of it, and who came down and sickened in the land stage.’’ Tilton was confirmed in his opinion by the fact that, as he wrote, ‘‘when the fever became epidemic, it took its rise at the water’s edge, and infected all, or with few exceptions, gradually up High Street.’’ Its progress was fast and the mortality was appalling. Between August 7, when it first appeared, and August 20, in just two weeks there were 106 deaths in Wilmington. The rate of fatality thereafter slack-

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ened, but by November 3, 252 Wilmingtonians had died of the fever—and recall that at this time the town’s population was under 5,000. (In the same period, there were 3,446 deaths in Philadelphia.) An emergency hospital was set up which admitted 88 of the fever-stricken, of whom 41 died. After the coming of cold weather routed the fever—why, no one knew—Wilmington was spared a further visit of it for four years. Then in 1802 the mysterious malady struck again. It appeared first in Philadelphia, where authorities blamed the epidemic on the schooner Eliza, which had lost several hands of yellow fever on her voyage from Haiti. Since the Eliza was blamed, so, in a sense, was the board of health in Wilmington, for the Eliza had stopped here to unload her cargo and had been allowed to proceed to Philadelphia ‘‘without proper cleansing.’’ Once Philadelphia was stricken, Wilmington took great precautions to keep the disease from coming down the river. A rigid quarantine was established by our board of health. Vessels were forbidden to come up the Christina beyond the mouth of the Brandywine; a watch was stationed on the bridge over the Brandywine twenty-four hours a day, and the other approaches to the city were only a little less carefully guarded. But in spite of all precautions the fever came. Again it spread rapidly from near the waterfront, the center of its contagion seeming to be at Second and King Streets. Here the first patient was discovered, a woman named Ann Davidson who lived with her father and had returned to Wilmington on Captain Bush’s packet from fever-stricken Philadelphia. King Street between Second and the Christina River was contracted to a narrow alley, and many of the cellars of the houses on it were full of water and filth. ‘‘This nest of noxious effluvia was offensive to the whole neighborhood from the beginning of August, was reported to the police as a public nuisance, and condemned as such, but not removed.’’ Physicians feared that removal of the filth might stir up ‘‘noxious vapors,’’ and suggested that this step be postponed until the arrival of cold weather. Meanwhile the inhabitants were advised to move without delay, but ‘‘there was no hospital establishment for the indigent sick, nurses could not be procured that would do justice to them, and the board of health had neither power nor funds to do much for their relief.’’ The epidemic of 1802, however, brought fewer fatalities than that of 1798. From September 1 to November 2 there were 72 deaths from the fever. By far the greatest incident of disease was in the area

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south of Third Street and east of Market; here 157 persons were ill and 56 died. The higher parts of town appeared secure at first, but by mid-October even their inhabitants ‘‘were seized with consternation and fled. A melancholy gloom pervaded the deserted streets, and the forlorn subjects of disease suffered accumulated miseries.’’ The health officer, Dr. Ebenezer Smith, and his wife and son caught the fever, and eventually, from illness and flight, only a few courageous souls were left to aid the afflicted, not a physician remaining but Dr. John Vaughan. ‘‘I may safely say,’’ wrote Vaughan, ‘‘I have not had two hours uninterrupted sleep for three days and nights—every morning out at day light. . . . I often walk from here to the lower end of town in the evening, without seeing a human creature. In the mornings I meet a few grave friends at the corners to inquire the events of the night, who shake me by the hand and express the most earnest satisfaction at meeting me once more.’’ The final fever victim in 1802 was John Ferris, a lay member of the board of health who had devotedly visited the sick and had often laid out and buried the dead. ‘‘My last companion,’’ Vaughan called him on hearing of his illness; ‘‘hard indeed will the decrees of fate appear, if after having toiled so long and so earnestly to relieve the distresses of others, he must now yield up that life which has been so useful to the public.’’ Hard indeed are the decrees of history that ignore the courage displayed by such men as these. Soldiers and statesmen and explorers of geographic frontiers—these men are properly remembered in our annals of the past. But other adventurers on the fringe of the little known and the unknown, such as the scholars and the scientists, are often unappreciated and forgotten. Fevers and agues were as devastating and as deadly as red Indians and Barbary pirates, so perhaps it is well that we take a few minutes to recall the problems and the failures and the achievements of the Delaware physician of 1800; his story is a significant part of the tale of man’s everlasting and somewhat groping effort against his environment.

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7 The Negro in Delaware Early in my career I was troubled by historians’ neglect of the role of the largest minority in our state, the Negroes. (I would have used the term African-Americans if I had been writing twenty years later.) Accordingly I made ‘‘The Negro in Delaware’’ the subject of an essay I submitted to the South Atlantic Quarterly, where it was published in 1957 (vol. 56, no. 4, pp. 428–44). I chose that journal because I had become acquainted with its editor, William B. Hamilton, whose book Anglo-American Justice on the Frontier was based on the legal notebooks of Thomas Rodney, a Delawarean. The strange inequitable distribution of seats in the state legislature ordered by the 1899 constitution and described near the end of this essay was corrected in the 1960s, at the order of federal courts. My article was reprinted years later by Paul Finkelman in Articles on American Slavery (New York: Garland, 1989), vol. 7 (Southern Slavery at the State and Local Level) pages 166–83.

HISTORICALLY, DELAWARE HAD SLAVERY BEFORE IT HAD ENGLISH MEN, speech, or institutions. After the mid-eighteenth century, chance several times preserved slavery in Delaware and left it the northernmost slave state. Gradually, however, personal manumissions freed so many slaves that by 1860 it was obvious that Delaware was the one slave state in which slavery would shortly disappear. But chance intervened again, and Delaware was left, in company with Kentucky, the last slave state in the Union. The first Negro in Delaware was probably Anthony Swart, whose name appears obscurely among the records of the New Sweden colony that from 1638 to 1655 lay along the shores of the Delaware in parts of three present states. Whether Anthony was a slave or merely a servant is not clear. More Negroes who were slaves were brought to Delaware by the Dutch after they conquered the Swedes in 1655; still more by the English after they expelled the Dutch in 1664. There were also free Negroes from early times. ‘‘It is found by expe135

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rience,’’ declared the preamble of a Delaware law in 1767, ‘‘that free Negroes and Mulattoes are idle and slothful, and often prove burthensome to the neighbourhood wherein they live.’’ In the period of the Revolution and the quarter century following, the abolition of slavery was effected or set under way in every state north of Delaware. Why not in Delaware? Chiefly, perhaps, because Delaware was just far enough south to make the slave seem indispensable to its agricultural economy; where the growing season was shorter, the need for field hands was less great. But even in Delaware the revolutionary spirit weakened the status of slavery. The slave trade received first attention. In the colonial assembly of 1775, Delawareans acted to ban further importation of slaves, though the English governor, John Penn, applied his veto. A year later Penn’s authority was overthrown, and Delawareans hastened to incorporate in their first state constitution the provision that Penn had vetoed. Soon it was made as illegal to export as to import slaves. When news came to the legislators that a slave ship, ousted from Philadelphia port, was coming to Wilmington to be outfitted for a new voyage, there was swift action to forbid such outfitting. Motions to abolish slavery, regularly introduced in the assembly, always failed, though often narrowly—twice by only one vote. Outside the assembly abolition sentiment grew. Quakers and Methodists were especially active, though men of all faiths joined such groups as the Delaware Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Sussex County Abolition Society. But the most active and effective abolitionist in Delaware was Warner Mifflin, a Quaker farmer from lower Delaware. Warner Mifflin was born and reared on the Eastern Shore of Virginia at a time when Quakers were not yet determined opponents of slaveholding. Doubts of the propriety of holding slaves first assailed him when he was fourteen. He says in his autobiography: ‘‘Being in the field with my father’s slaves, a young man among them questioned me, whether I thought it could be right, that they should be toiling in order to raise me, and that I might be sent to school; and by and by, their children must do so for mine.’’ Mifflin determined then that he would not hold slaves and kept to this determination. Moving to Delaware, he became a large landholder in the area of the present town of Camden, prospering in spite of his neighbors’ forebodings of ruin as he freed the slaves that came into his possession. Merely to free them was not enough.

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Mifflin’s Quaker conscience caused him to pay his former slaves for services they had given him in bondage. Furthermore, he let them have land to farm on shares in order to support themselves. In Friendly visitations Mifflin preached his abolitionist convictions to Quakers throughout America. He memorialized Congress in 1793 concerning the shame of slavery. St. Jean de Crevecoeur, through his American Letters, gave him an international reputation, though Mifflin’s pacifism rather than his abolitionism was Crevecoeur’s subject; in the Revolution Mifflin visited British General Howe in Philadelphia and Washington outside to urge them to lay down their arms. Mifflin was not the only landholder in Delaware to free his slaves; John Dickinson freed a large number of slaves on his estates in 1781. Kent, the home county of Dickinson and Mifflin, became a notable abolitionist county of Delaware in their lifetime; after their death, the county had the greatest percentage of freemen among the Negroes in its population. When Warner Mifflin died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1798, he was borne to the grave by his faithful blacks. A neighbor could not resist making a savage entry in his diary: ‘‘He was opposed secretly to the American Contest for Freedom yet he Professed a great Regard for Negro Freedom & instead of Teaching Negroes True Religion filled all slaves full of mischief Toward their Masters & has thereby disturbed society more than any other Person in it.’’ Mifflin complained to the Delaware legislature of the transportation of Delaware Negroes across the state’s borders to be sold into bondage on the Southern frontier, where there was an unrelenting demand for field hands. Not only were slaves taken. A group of petitioners declared that ‘‘evil disposed Persons on the borders have for a considerable time past made a practice of stealing . . . Free Negroe & Mulatto Persons, and the same do sell in the Southern States.’’ As a consequence a law was passed in 1793 providing that such a kidnapper ‘‘shall be publicly whipped on his or her bare back with thirty-nine lashes well laid on, and shall stand in the pillory for the space of one hour, with both of his or her ears nailed thereto, and at the expiration of the hour, shall have the soft part of his or her ears cut off.’’ In spite of the law’s severity, or perhaps because of it, the crime was winked at. A notorious kidnapper was Patty Cannon, who with her son-in-law, Joe Johnson, ran a kidnapping ring for several decades from her tavern on the Delaware-Maryland boundary at the

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hamlet now called Reliance. Patty’s crimes became a legend on the Delmarva Peninsula, the flat agricultural plain east of the Chesapeake, including most of Delaware and the ‘‘Eastern Shore’’ of Maryland and Virginia. Patty did not shrink from murder: her victims included not only recalcitrant Negroes but at least one of the slave-trading whites who came up the rivers from the Chesapeake to purchase a black cargo. Murder was indeed her undoing; when, in 1829, a man’s bones were uncovered by a plowman near her tavern, Patty was at last captured and jailed. Under indictment but before trial she died in prison at Georgetown, county seat of Sussex. While Patty Cannon, Joe Johnson, and others of their ilk smuggled Delaware Negroes southward, another illegal route of exodus was opened to the North. Along this, the Underground Railroad, crept slaves from Delaware and the Chesapeake’s shores, often guided by the most famous of the Underground conductors, Harriet Tubman, a stooped and gnarled female Moses who took these children to the promised land. A Quaker merchant of Wilmington, Thomas Garrett, became famous as a station agent on the railroad. Still, like Patty Cannon, he was a criminal, and he too eventually fell into the clutches of the law. In 1848 Justice Taney on circuit and the local district judge found Garrett guilty of aiding the escape of slaves. The fine assessed against him wiped out his little accumulation, but Garrett seemed undisturbed. ‘‘Now, Judge,’’ he is reported to have said, ‘‘I do not think I have always done my duty, being fearful of losing what little I possessed; but now that you have relieved me, I will go home and put another story on my house, so that I can accommodate more of God’s poor.’’ Both cheers and hisses greeted his speech, but one of the jurors who had convicted him strode across the benches to grasp his hand and beg his forgiveness. The report of the trial was widely circulated; Mrs. Stowe said that Garrett was her inspiration for the character of Simeon Holliday, the heroic Quaker in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Garrett is believed to have aided the escape of more than twentyseven hundred slaves. Though his actions were roundly condemned by slave owners and their sympathizers, he never suffered physical harm. A slave owner from down the peninsula met him in Wilmington and scolded him, threatening, ‘‘If we ever catch you in our part of the world, we’ll tar and feather you.’’ ‘‘All right,’’ Garrett responded, ‘‘the first time I am in thy part of the world I will call and see thee.’’ Soon afterwards, finding himself near this man’s resi-

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dence, Garrett drove up to his house and asked for him. When the slave owner appeared, Garrett said, ‘‘Thee said thee wanted to see me when I was in this part of the world and here I am.’’ The slave owner just waved him away: ‘‘Go along, Mr. Garrett, no one could do any harm to you.’’ The state that sheltered Patty Cannon and Thomas Garrett showed many contradictions in its treatment of slaves. It rejected legislative emancipation, but by a narrow margin; in 1847 Representative Swayne’s bill for the gradual abolition of slavery was accepted twelve to eight by one house of the legislature, but failed in the other house by one vote. But if slavery was not abolished in Delaware, its curse was to some extent ameliorated. For example, a Negro in Delaware, and only in Delaware of all the slave states, was considered to be free unless proved to be a slave. No wonder that this was so; long before the Civil War most of the Delaware Negroes had gained their freedom. In 1790 there were 8,887 slaves in Delaware; by 1820 this number had dwindled to 4,509; in 1840 it was 2,605; in 1860 it was 1,798. In those same four census years the number of free Negroes constantly rose from 3,899 in 1790 to 12,958 in 1820, 16,919 in 1840, and 19,829 in 1860. Since the total number of Negroes steadily increased, the decline of slavery in Delaware cannot be explained by flight on the Underground Railway. Obviously the Negroes had found an important place in Delaware society and were increasing with the other elements in the population. But the slaves were declining in numbers, and records make it fairly certain that this was largely because slave owners were freeing their slaves. Why were these manumissions occurring? In part, religion moved men to free their slaves. ‘‘Slavery,’’ asserted a group of Delawareans, ‘‘tends to destroy that free agency necessary to render a man accountable for his actions to a Supreme Being.’’ Republican sentiment motivated others; a man quoted Montesquieu to the effect that ‘‘slavery in a republic or free government is a paradox.’’ Perhaps economic motivation was most important. Delaware was the northernmost slave state after the Revolution; the climate here would not permit so long a growing season as in states farther south. Thus there was a comparatively long period of time each year when agricultural labor could not be fully employed. A hired hand on the farm could be dismissed, at least in theory, at the end of the busy season; a slave had to be fed and sheltered in winter as in summer. The farm lands of Delaware, moreover, were wearing out. Little

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was done to restore the fertility of the soil; ‘‘our country does not yield the half now of what it used to,’’ downstate farmers declared. Delaware’s small size meant that it had no western frontier, no virgin soil to which planters might transfer their slaves. If they moved west, they left their state. Delaware farmers found that the overhead cost of maintaining slavery—food, shelter, clothing—remained fairly constant, but state laws prevented a reduction of that overhead by the sale of slaves across state lines to the west, where the price of slaves was high. Consequently, as the value of Delaware farms declined, the value of agricultural labor in Delaware did likewise; this declining value readied the master for recognition of other reasons for manumission. The climate and the economy did not explain why Kent, the central Delaware county, led the state in manumissions. By 1860 there were only 203 slaves in Kent as against 7,271 free Negroes. Even in 1790 almost half of the Negroes of Kent had been free. The hand of Warner Mifflin is plainly to be seen in this, his county. Since, however, even the county with the most slaves, Sussex, had more than three free Negroes for every slave in 1860, the wonder is that Delaware had not completely and legally abolished slavery before the Civil War. The answer was partly accidental, since as late as 1847 only one vote in the legislature had stood in the way of abolition. But there may have been an answer in the Delaware character. The Delawarean was loath to change his ways or his institutions. Change would come, but he was grudging in giving it statutory recognition. His was a land where sons plowed anew their great-grandsires’ furrows; no great industrial cosmopolis stirred the blood, quickened the minds, and challenged the habits of men. Even the abolitionists who sought change in Delaware asked that their goal be reached by gradual steps; ‘‘We wish,’’ a petition to the legislature declared, ‘‘not any sudden change in the established order of things, lest by benefitting a part, we should give a shock to the whole.’’ Some abolitionists, particularly those outside Delaware—William Lloyd Garrison of the Liberator, for example—cared little whether in ‘‘benefitting a part’’ they ‘‘should give a shock to the whole.’’ Perhaps this tended to cause the average Delawarean to draw into himself and exhibit outwardly his stolid recalcitrance before emotional appeals to his conscience to free his fellow man. Not only recalcitrance seized him, but fright; in 1832, the year after Nat Turner’s slave insurrection in Virginia, a law was passed forbidding even free

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Richard Allen (1760–1831). Raised as a slave in Delaware. Allen eventually became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. From The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen (New York: Abingdon Press).

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Negroes to possess arms. In 1851 the entrance of free Negroes into the state was forbidden on the ground that their increase was ‘‘a great and growing evil, injurious and corrupting to the resident Negroes.’’ Just as these years of intense and emotional abolition movements roused a recalcitrance in Delaware that led in some degree to a setback in the progress of the Negroes, so the Civil War and its liberating drive stimulated a reaction in Delaware that was to prolong discriminations against Negroes for a quarter century. Lincoln never carried Delaware; as the Civil War dragged on, his administration provoked Delawareans in a number of ways. Not that Delaware was secessionist; its geographic position and its economic welfare made any thought of secession madness. While regretting a division in the Federal Union their state had been the first to join, however, many and probably most Delawareans thought the seceding states should be allowed to depart in peace. The bitter military struggle that seemed to be a Northern campaign of conquest was not universally acclaimed in Delaware. The suspension of use of the writ of habeas corpus, the disarming of some militia companies, the presence of Federal troops at polling places, the adoption of an ironclad loyalty oath in the United States Senate (Delaware’s Senator Bayard took it and then resigned in protest) were irritants that were remembered all the more effectively as the war gave way to the Reconstruction. The South’s dismay at the severity of its treatment by Congress, at the continued military occupation, at the enfranchisement of the Negro and his encouragement to rise in the social and political scale, at the convenient abuse and disregard of states’ rights awoke sympathy in Delaware, and Delaware’s senators pleaded the cause of the South in Washington. The War and Reconstruction furnished Delaware Democrats with an overwhelmingly effective platform. Democrats had been fairly successful in Delaware since 1850, but their success had lain largely in the quarrels and divisions of their opposition rather than in any virtues of their own. Now, however, the antics of the Republicans in Congress gave the Delaware Democracy exactly the issue it needed to hold its state. A peculiar situation came about. Delaware, though a slave state, had been the least of the slave states. Now it became one of the last two slave states. Delaware’s ties had been with Philadelphia and New York rather than with Baltimore and Richmond. Now it became a part of the Solid South. Delaware’s politics had normally been at

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variance with the politics of most of agrarian America—Federalist when they were Republican, Whig when they were Democratic. Now Delaware became so decisively Democratic that there were years (1878 and 1886) when the Republicans made no attempt even to present a ticket. Lincoln had a plan for Delaware’s slaves. The Federal government would furnish the state with money in securities to buy the freedom of every slave. Sales were to be forced, but prices would be set by a neighborhood board of assessors, with recourse to the courts. This system, if successful in Delaware, where slaves were few, could be extended to the other loyal slave states and then to the Confederate states as they surrendered or were conquered. Lincoln had said that a nation half free and half slave could not endure. Through the required but compensated emancipation of Delaware slaves a roadway would be laid to freedom, as by eminent domain a roadway could be laid to the Pacific. But Delaware spurned Lincoln’s plan. For various reasons Delaware was recalcitrant: there was a partisan distaste for the Washington administration and for a president who was, said Delaware’s Senator Saulsbury, the most imbecile man he ever met; there was a tendency to look a gift horse in the eyes and ears as well as the mouth, a rural or small-town wonderment at where the money was coming from. Repulsed, Lincoln resorted to an Emancipation Proclamation that declared the freedom of all slaves in areas in rebellion, January 1, 1863; but which freed no slaves in Delaware or the other loyal slave states or Union-occupied portions of seceded states. The other states generally ended slavery by state laws as Republicans won temporary control of them. Not so in Kentucky or Delaware. They were still slave states at Appomattox, still slave states when Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre. Not till a half-year after the war’s end, a half-year after Lincoln’s death, was slavery brought to an end in these loyal slave states. Abolition’s final triumph in Kentucky and Delaware occurred because the Thirteenth Amendment, which they had spurned, became part of the Federal Constitution in December 1865. Of course abolition, thus forced upon Delaware, did not mean an end of inequalities for the Delaware Negro. Nor did the Fifteenth Amendment, also passed over Delaware’s rejection, effectively bring him the right to vote. The constitution of Delaware restricted the franchise to free, white, male taxpayers, and though ‘‘free’’ and ‘‘white’’ were no longer legal qualifications, the provision that a

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voter must be a taxpayer became the Achilles’ heel of Negro enfranchisement: by a law passed in 1873, a Democratic legislature made it the duty of every citizen to see to it that he was properly assessed for his taxes. Unless he was assessed, of course, he had no tax to pay, and unless he paid a tax, he could not vote. The assessor, not liable to prosecution for omissions from the assessment list, neglected all Negroes, and thus made it difficult for the Negro to qualify as a voter. If by any mischance a Negro was assessed and sought to pay his tax, it was difficult for him to find the tax collector ‘‘in.’’ For tax collector, assessor, and officialdom generally in Delaware were devoted to the proposition that by hook or by crook the effective operation of many Reconstruction laws must be thwarted. Collector, assessor, and Delaware officialdom generally were Democrats. And Delaware Democrats argued that the Reconstruction amendments had been added to the Constitution by sharp dealing, by an unconstitutional legerdemain that counted Southern states in the Union when their vote was needed and out of the Union when it was not. Such tactics deserved to be confronted with defenses equally devious and sly. In seeking such defenses and in finding them, Delaware joined forces with the South, and Delaware senators, like James and Thomas Bayard, able and valuable men, became spokesmen for the South in Washington. By an odd chain of events this state, despite its economic and historic ties with Philadelphia, despite its disapproval of secession, despite its ancient Federalism and Henry Clay Whiggery, now at last became a part of the ‘‘solid South’’ and a convert to Democracy and to states’ rights. Whereas through most of the loyal states in the years after the Civil War the Republicans, now becoming the Grand Old Party, pitched their campaigns to the tune of their patriotism, their unionism, their martyred hero from Illinois, and, conversely, their steadfast opposition to treason, secession, and assassination—historical themes of past grandeur, sung and shouted to the waving of the grand old flag—whereas the echo of the Civil War was for decades esteemed a Republican slogan in such states as Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Massachusetts, the reverse was true in Delaware. Here the Democrats sang of the same theme but with different words and to a different tune. Bloodshed and tyranny, martial law and arbitrary arrests were recalled; forceful conquest of states that sought peacefully, if unwisely, to leave the Union they had freely entered, forceful oppression of these conquered states by the laws of a wild rump Congress, enforced by bayonets and rifles, were recounted.

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For a time this was a theme that could win votes in Delaware. For almost a quarter century, through the years of military reconstruction and for a decade beyond, Democrats ruled Delaware and allied it politically to a solidifying South. But as the years passed and memories of Civil War and even of Reconstruction grew dim, Delaware’s peripheral relation to the South became evident once more, and the realities of a Delaware Valley economy that attached Delaware to Philadelphia—and thus to Republican doctrines—exerted a stronger attraction than a war-born Southern connection that had always been largely sentimental. At last, in 1888, Democratic intraparty strife allowed Republicans to win the legislature. In the decade that followed, Republican victories became increasingly frequent; after 1900 they became the rule rather than the exception. Republican rule meant the end of the disfranchisement of the Negro. A political gesture that marked the opening of a new era was the long-delayed ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments by a Republican legislature in 1901. For the Republicans it was not a question of merely permitting the Negro to vote; they actively courted his support. They needed the Negro’s vote not only to defeat the Democrats but for a bitter and prolonged quarrel within their own party. A man remarkable for a long name, a large fortune, and a great ambition was the central figure in this quarrel: John Edward Charles O’Sullivan Addicks. He was a Philadelphian, a self-made man, a financier who had enjoyed unusual success in the organization of urban gas companies. In the Philadelphia tradition he had become a suburbanite, but his choice of a suburban residence had led him not west on the Main Line or north of Philadelphia toward Chestnut Hill but into the northern edge of Delaware, to a home in Claymont. Republican conquest of Delaware meant that Democratic families, who had enjoyed political privileges with little challenge since the Civil War, were now to be ousted from their nearly hereditary posts. A host of new officials would be chosen, and Addicks saw no reason why he should not be in their van. A seat in the Senate of the United States struck his fancy as the most desirable place for him in the new regime. Seeking it, he spent a fortune; spending and seeking he convulsed Delaware politics for a decade. Though Addicks, either by his money or his espousal of popular causes, won many friends, some Republican leaders were repelled by his obvious political opportunism and joined forces against him. The result was that Delaware was the battleground of three political parties: the Democrats, now a mi-

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nority, and two Republican factions, the Addicks group and its opponents. Every vote was important as Addicks and anti-Addicks Republicans sought to bolster their strength election after election in the legislature that was the pathway to the Senate. From 1895 to 1905 the conflict was waged; in the end Addicks was denied the prize he sought. The most his supporters could do for him was to prevent the election of anyone at all as senator; this they did again and again. Throughout this bitter conflict the Negro enjoyed his improved status. Formerly spurned by officeholders, he was now cozened, entreated, or even paid to vote. He was all the happier that both of the factions seeking his vote represented the party of his own choice, Lincoln’s party. His new status was recognized by some political favors: some political patronage was accorded him; in 1900 a Negro for the first time sat on a Delaware jury; legislative support was found for a segregated school system and for a state college for the colored, then a college in name only, that had been founded in 1891. But the Democrats remained sullen. Their banners still waved over a ‘‘lily white’’ party. They still shrieked their warnings against mongrelization. Their campaign methods, at the lowest level, still employed the old devices—a photograph of a ‘‘mixed’’ class in a Pennsylvania school and a warning that ‘‘this could happen here.’’ But they lost most elections. The Republican party, united after 1905, became the dominant party in Delaware. The new Republican era was generally a prosperous time for Delaware, as expanded industry and improved transportation brought new opportunities to both black and white citizens. The Negro’s most notable advance lay in the field of education. A multimillion-dollar gift by Pierre S. du Pont for the improvement of Delaware schools made possible the construction of a new school for Negroes in every school district. A new school code, adopted in 1921, placed colored and white schools on a basis of equality in terms of teachers’ salaries, length of session, and the like. By the 1920s the pattern of interracial relations that had evolved in Delaware mixed Northern and Southern customs in a manner that befitted a border state. The Negro could sit beside a white man in public transportation, but in theaters, schools, and restaurants he was segregated. At the polls the Negro’s right to vote was uncontested, but in hospitals, in housing, and in employment, segregation prevailed. Separate institutions housed Negro and white juvenile delinquents who were females, but youthful male delinquents of all

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colors were in the same institution. Careful observation could detect slight differences in the status of the Negro as the observer traveled out of the urban Wilmington area in the north and into the rural Delaware that stretched southward. Wilmington itself exhibited a subtle shading of interracial relations between those of Philadelphia, on the one hand, and Baltimore, on the other. The great depression brought a new era in the evolution of the status of the Negro that was immeasurably quickened by World War II. The new note was sounded first in politics, for in 1932 the Delaware Democrats, like their party colleagues in many Northern states, made an open bid for the Negro vote as for the vote of the depression-struck generally. Abandoning the ‘‘lily white’’ tradition and the rules of their party, the Democrats opened their primary elections to Negroes and sought to enroll these former pariahs in local Negro Democratic clubs. An increasing number of Democratic victories indicates that the move had some success in attracting votes, though it seems likely that the Negro’s vote was won more easily by national candidates, and specifically by Roosevelt, than by local Democrats, who had to compete with Republican politicians long skilled in turning out Negro voters. But the great significance of this political move was that the Delaware Democrats had abandoned their Southern orientation, that hereafter the Delaware Negro would face no organized party opposition to the improvement of his status. The opening of the next decade, the time of the great war, brought another new development, as surprising in its way as the Democratic party volte-face, the opening of athletic relations between Negro and white high schools in Wilmington. A minor theme this was, but it indicated what notable social changes might be acceptable. In the 1920s a series of football games between a Wilmington public high school and the local Catholic high school had been temporarily stopped, mainly because of the high feeling that had arisen among the youth of the community as a result of the games. Consequently, it was quite an innovation in the 1940s to begin athletic contests with the local Negro high school. A Quaker institution, the Wilmington Friends School, was the first to open athletic relations with a Negro school with a basketball game in December 1942. The local Catholic high school soon did likewise, and the white public schools did not lag far behind. The war brought labor shortages, and these shortages brought the Negro new vocational opportunities. Regular employment and dependable income brought the Negro an improved social status in

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Delaware, and this rise in status was augmented by the antiracist attitudes that were an intellectual concomitant of the war against Hitler. Though the Negro’s new job was often lost at the war’s end, some portion of his improved status was retained, a shadow that outlasted the substance, perhaps much as woman’s status retained after World War I some of the prestige that it had won in that war. Postwar developments in regard to the status of the Delaware Negro were remarkable, particularly in view of the slow rate of progress of previous times. In politics the Negro’s increased stature was demonstrated by the election of the first Negro member of the legislature. This occurred in 1948, when a Negro businessman, William J. Winchester, a Wilmington Republican, was elected to the lower house of the General Assembly. Winchester was reelected in 1950 but died early in 1952, That year the first Negro Democrat was sent to the legislature, a man named Paul Livingston, again from Wilmington, and he too won reelection in 1954 and 1956. Still more startling were developments in regard to the admission of Negroes to public places. In 1951 the Wilmington YWCA announced that its cafeteria would henceforth be open to Negroes and whites alike. In the same year the announcement was quietly made that most of the Wilmington motion picture theaters, heretofore closed to Negroes, would hereafter admit patrons of all races on equal terms. In the same year the Delaware National Guard announced that it had enrolled its first Negroes. Two years later, in 1953, the leading Wilmington hotel, the Hotel du Pont, announced that it no longer would make any distinction based on race in the use of its facilities. But these developments were voluntary and localized, confined to Delaware’s largest city, Wilmington, and its environs. The school controversy produced high feeling and tumult because it was neither voluntary nor localized. In the beginning, however, Negro admission to the schools proceeded in a quiet manner. In 1948, in the wake of a number of Supreme Court decisions, the trustees of the University of Delaware announced that Delaware Negroes would henceforth be admitted to the university in courses and curricula that were not being offered by the Delaware State College, a landgrant institution for Negroes. This action permitted the enrollment of a number of Negroes in the engineering and graduate schools and in the extension courses that the university conducts throughout the state. The door thus opened was soon pushed wider. With aid from the

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NAACP, a group of Delaware Negroes petitioned for admission to the university in other fields, claiming that the Negro college did not in any curriculum offer Negroes an opportunity equal to that afforded whites in the state university. A chancery court decision upheld the petitioners’ plea, and thereupon, in 1950, all racial bars to the admission of Delaware Negroes to the university were removed. In the same year a private school in Wilmington, the Salesianum High School, conducted by a Catholic order, the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales, announced that it was admitting five Negro boys. Declared the principal, Father Lawless: ‘‘I see nothing to apologize for, other than the fact that it wasn’t done years ago. I think it’s a case of reaching a point of either stopping the teaching of democracy or starting to practice it.’’ Salesianum’s action was a spur to other Catholic schools to abandon racial segregation, and in 1952 the parochial school system generally was declared to be integrated. There are, however, few Catholic schools in the southern part of Delaware, in the area below the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal that is usually called ‘‘downstate.’’ Here education is largely a monopoly of the public schools. The attack on segregation here caused furor and the first setback in the postwar revision of status. Segregation in the public schools (and in the university) was not a matter that could be either instituted or abandoned by the voluntary action of school administrators. The present constitution of Delaware, written in 1897 when the state was still under the shadow of Civil War and Reconstruction patterns of thinking, ordered that ‘‘separate schools for white and colored children’’ should be maintained by the state. In 1952 a group of Negro plaintiffs secured a chancery court decision, confirmed by the state supreme court, opening two white schools in northern Delaware to Negro children on the basis of an argument that in terms of the Federal Constitution the existing Negro schools were not equal to the white schools. At least one additional white school thereupon admitted Negro students voluntarily. All of these developments proceeded alike in an orderly manner and without public tumult. Not so when the United States Supreme Court decision of 1954 against school segregation foreshadowed the end of the dual school system throughout Delaware. When the public schools opened in the fall of 1954 a number of northern Delaware school districts began more or less slowly to admit Negroes to white schools. But downstate, in southern Delaware, only two schools attempted any degree of integration. One, the high school

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in Dover, the state capital, a town booming with the influx of families drawn by a large, expanding air base, admitted some Negroes to the tenth grade. The novelty met a quiet reception; a year later another small group of Negroes were admitted. But in Milford, a town of 5,179 people (1950 census), south of Dover and spanning the line that divides Kent from Sussex County, the innovation met a different fate. For two weeks all was outwardly quiet, but then trouble suddenly exploded. Local people, some businessmen of the town and some farmers from rural areas served by the Milford high school, held meetings, petitioned the school board to oust the Negro students, and organized both a school boycott for their own children and a picket line around the school to dissuade other children from attending. Most of the local leaders preferred to remain in the background; Bryant Bowles, whose National Association for the Advancement of White People was, like thousands of other organizations, incorporated in Delaware, was summoned to this state to take public leadership of the anti-integration movement. The Milford boycott was successful. The high school was first closed and then reopened without the Negro students. The school board resigned, and a new board was appointed. Still a third board was elected in the spring of 1955, composed of men who had Bowles’s support—unrequested, they declared. Resignations brought about many changes in the school faculty and staff. The Milford reaction proceeded so far that in the fall of 1955 school authorities canceled a football game with Dover because one Dover player, a substitute, was a Negro. This took place despite the fact that a considerable majority of the Milford players wished to play Dover, whether or not the Negro substitute entered the game. Milford was unique, not only in the turbulence that erupted there, but in the fact that it was the only town south of Dover in which any school desegregation had been attempted by the summer of 1957. When in 1956 the school board of Milton, a neighboring town, displayed a willingness to desegregate in the future, public criticism forced the board’s resignation and replacement. Yet segregation was slowly declining in the Delaware public schools. In the school year 1956–1957 about one-third of all students, and over onethird of the colored students, were in what were called ‘‘integrated situations.’’ Integration advanced rapidly in northern Delaware, where two-thirds of the little state’s population lives. But this two-thirds of the people does not have proportionate rep-

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resentation in the General Assembly that makes Delaware’s laws. Legislative seats, as in most states, are apportioned in favor of the rural areas—more so in Delaware than in most states, for whereas the membership of one legislative house is usually apportioned on the basis of population distribution, neither house of the Delaware legislature has its membership so apportioned. Instead, a fixed geographic distribution is established by the state constitution, and it can be changed only by a three-quarters vote of two successive legislatures, or, in other words, only by the approval of a body that has a certain vested interest in preventing change in apportionment. Sussex County has five state senators, the city of Wilmington only two, although Wilmington has more people than Sussex. Sussex County has ten state representatives, Wilmington only five. Kent County, which has fewer people than Sussex, has just as many legislators in each house. Thus political parties in Delaware face the problem of appealing to the densely populated urban area in order to get the votes they need for all statewide elections, and at the same time must carry the rural districts if they are to control the legislature. Placed in this ambivalent position, they will probably try to compromise the issue, or rather, to play it down, to ignore it officially if they can. Such a course would probably allow downstate Delaware to delay racial integration in the schools as long as it is constitutionally possible. But it may also calm fevered tempers and allay tumultuous excitement. And a calm Delaware, an undisturbed, unexcited Delaware, a traditional Delaware will provide the climate of opinion in which the status of the Negro can continue to advance, slowly, in all likelihood, but steadily.

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8 Eight Newspaper Columns In 1959 Martin Klaver, editor of the editorial page of the Wilmington Morning News, invited me to contribute a weekly column to his paper. Remembering my stated intention in the eighth grade of becoming a newspaper man, I accepted, and my column on historical subjects, was published under the title of The Delaware Story. After a year, I found that the column, though normally written in one evening, was taking too much of my time and energy, so thereafter, from 1960 to 1965, I wrote the column only every three weeks. I stopped it altogether when I took a sabbatical leave in the fall of 1965.

Wilmington Gaped in 1785 I believe the first of the columns reprinted here was suggested by some exploring I did among old newspapers in the excellent library of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin when I was teaching at the University of Wisconsin in the summer of 1960. My explorations there encouraged me to pay renewed attention to old newspapers available at home. And my attention to the oldest surviving Delaware newspaper yielded material for the following column published November 26, 1960.

THE GRANDDADDY OF DELAWARE NEWSPAPERS IS THE DELAWARE GAZETTE founded in 1785. The oldest existing copy, the issue for June 28, 1785, is among the treasures of the Historical Society of Delaware, housed in the Old Town Hall. The Gazette was not the first Delaware paper. That was the Wilmington Courant, published in 1762. But so far as I know, no one now living has ever seen a copy of the Courant. The only proof we have that it existed consists of some references to it in Philadelphia and New York papers. Probably the Courant died a quick death for want of advertising 152

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revenue. Certainly the Gazette’s editors did not get rich from the issue of June 28, 1785, their third. It carried only five advertisements. The largest advertisement in this issue was placed by Andrew Rey, who had a store on the west side of Market Street and sold all sorts of goods—plated candlesticks, elegant chintzes, coffee mills, ‘‘French coniac brandy,’’ ‘‘Dutch cheese and Rhode Island ditto,’’ snuff, anchovies, ‘‘bed and second bottom cords.’’ Joseph Shallcross, Jr., advertised Antigua rum for sale, and Samuel Reynolds advertised the strange combination of horses and eightday clocks. Two other advertisers offered rewards for stolen horses. The Gazette’s columns were filled mostly by news notes—news from elsewhere, from Massachusetts, for instance, where people complained of the taxes (hardships in this state led to Shays’s rebellion a year later); from Nicaragua, where the British were occupying coastal towns; from Morocco, where the sultan had seized an American ship but would release it on negotiation of a new treaty providing for economic assistance, he hoped; from Europe, where the Dutch were threatened with war by the Holy Roman Emperor (and Lafayette asked General Washington to give military advice to the Dutch). In looking over these items, I am startled to find how much they resemble some contemporary news items. Various items of cultural ‘‘filler’’ appeared: an account of Charles James Fox’s boyhood, an uncomplimentary paragraph on Voltaire. ‘‘Nothing stops him if he can procure himself readers,’’ the paragraph declared. Four Delaware items appear in the news columns of this little paper of four pages, each three columns wide. Two items are documents—statutes recently enacted by the General Assembly. One guaranteed ‘‘that inestimable privilege, a trial by their country’’ (trial by jury, I suppose), to men accused of petty larceny involving less than five shillings. The other law suppressed fairs, explaining that there were now numerous stores throughout the state and therefore the original need of fairs (to bring merchants together and provide a market for local wares) had disappeared. The fairs, the preamble to the law explained, encouraged immorality, provoked quarrels, and encouraged servants and young people to drink to excess and to buy articles of no real use or benefit. Besides, neighbors complained. The third Delaware item reported the repair of a leak in a local vessel, the brig Maria, Captain Pool, anchored off Bombay Hook and bound for the West Indies.

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All of these items—laws, shipping news, foreign disturbances— were to be expected. The fourth item was given most attention and must have seemed to the Gazette’s editors to be the most unusual event of the week. What happened? A female English historian came to town. ‘‘The beautifulness’’ of Wilmington’s situation, the heat (it was late June), and the fatigue of her journey—‘‘all conducted to make this greatest historian of her age remain a day with us, which gave opportunity to a few of the principal inhabitants to congratulate her arrival.’’ If the principal inhabitants knew the full story, they must have titillated with the thrill of scandals from the great world brought to little Wilmington. Mrs. Macaulay Graham was an authentic historian. Mary Wollstonecraft called her ‘‘the woman of the greatest abilities that (England) ever produced.’’ She had met Franklin and Turgot in France, had been praised by Horace Walpole, had been painted by Gainsborough. She had, moreover, taken America’s side publicly before the Revolution. Now she was returning from a ten-day visit with the Washingtons at Mt. Vernon. The scandal of her career was that at the age of forty-seven, when she had been twelve years a widow, she had married a twenty-oneyear-old surgeon’s mate. This ‘‘Dr. Graham was, moreover, brother to the leading quack of his age, the notorious Dr. James Graham of Bath, who claimed to cure diseases by a magnetic throne (a mild electric charge in a bathtub), ‘‘aetherial and balsamic medicines,’’ milk baths, and ‘‘dry friction.’’ At her second marriage, an admirer sold a chapel he had built for her remains, and scrapped a statue erected in her honor. And by the time of ‘‘his’’ second marriage, her husband was claiming to be not just a doctor but a reverend. Wilmington gaped at Mrs. Graham. And the Gazette editor called on the city to rear its own genius: ‘‘Now, Wilmington . . . encourage your seminaries, teach your sons wisdom, . . . lift your fair hand and eclipse all mankind by the refulgent beams of wisdom which now clouded and in obscurity lurks in some hidden breast . . . Arouse from your lethargic state.’’

Federal Seeds Sown at Annapolis It seemed to me that too little attention was paid to the Annapolis Convention of 1786, precursor of the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in

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1787. I thought of writing a book about it, but I was overwhelmed by other obligations and contented myself with small pieces like the following column published August 26, 1961. An important convention took place in Annapolis 175 years ago next month. Delaware had a large part in it, for the president (Dickinson) and one-fourth of the delegates (three) were from Delaware. Three of the other delegates were from New Jersey, three were from Virginia, two from New York, and one from Pennsylvania. But none from Maryland! It is strange that Maryland wasn’t represented at a convention held in the Maryland capital. And to make the situation all the stranger, it was Maryland that originated the call for this convention. But the convention that met at Annapolis was not the kind of convention Maryland meant to have. Two rivers and a bay—the Pocomoke, the Potomac, and the Chesapeake—caused misunderstandings between Maryland and Virginia. These two states shared the mouth of the Pocomoke River, they shared the Chesapeake Bay, and they shared the use of the Potomac—though Virginia had no claim to the river itself. Which state should erect and maintain lighthouses? Which place buoys in the channels? Which control the fishing? Could Maryland tax a ship at an Alexandria, Virginia, pier because it was afloat in the Potomac, which belonged to Maryland? To settle questions like these, Maryland and Virginia commissioners met at Alexandria and Mount Vernon in 1785. They made an agreement which was sent to the legislatures for approval. When the Maryland legislature accepted the agreement, it proposed another meeting to which Pennsylvania and Delaware would be invited. They wanted Pennsylvania included in a meeting because Pennsylvania shared the Susquehanna River with Maryland. Furthermore, George Washington, being interested in a canal from the Chesapeake to the Ohio, knew from western trips that Pennsylvania rivers—the Youghiogheny, for instance—would need to be used if a canal from the Potomac was to get over the mountains. Delaware was to be invited because of the need ‘‘to open a water communication’’ (a canal) between the Chesapeake and the Delaware. The Maryland Legislature sent a report of its action to Virginia. There young James Madison saw his chance to strengthen the gov-

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ernment of the United States. Keeping in the background himself, he persuaded his legislature to invite all the states to consider a uniform commercial system (tariffs, shipping regulations, and the like). Annapolis was named as the place of the meeting in order to keep the convention away from large cities where wealthy merchants might influence it. Delaware received invitations from both Maryland (to a meeting of four states) and Virginia (to a meeting of all states) and accepted both. So did Pennsylvania. But Maryland did not accept the Virginia invitation. Commercial regulations that were for all the states, said the Maryland Senate, ought to come from Congress. And if a convention was needed, Congress, not Virginia ought to call the convention. In Delaware, on the other hand, everyone wanted to get into the act. The Delaware House of Assembly (lower house) appointed five delegates to Annapolis: Gunning Bedford, Jr., George Read, William Peery, Eleazer McComb, and Jacob Broom. The Legislative Council (upper house) protested, saying the delegates should be chosen as members of Congress were at that time, by a joint meeting of the two houses. The House of Assembly gave in. A joint session chose Bedford, Read, and Broom from the list of the lower house, but substituted John Dickinson and Richard Bassett for Peery and McComb. It was a good thing Dickinson and Bassett were chosen because they were interested enough to attend the convention, whereas of the other three men only Read went to Annapolis. Apparently Dickinson, from Wilmington, and Read, from New Castle, went together, meeting Bassett on the way. At Annapolis, the Delawareans found only the four middle states and Virginia represented. Four more states had appointed delegates, but they didn’t arrive in time to be of any help. The meeting was called for September 4, and after waiting a week, the delegates organized on September 11 by unanimously choosing Dickinson as their president. Subsequently a committee was appointed of one member from each state, George Read representing Delaware. The committee prepared a report, written by young Alexander Hamilton, recommending that since so few states were represented another meeting should be held—next spring in Philadelphia. And there, not just commerce, but all the problems of the government should be considered. This was exactly what Madison, as well as Dickinson, Read, and

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Bassett, wanted. They all showed up in Philadelphia and helped write the new Constitution. And this time all the states except Rhode Island were represented.

Herrman’s Map Is One to Crow About Augustine Herrman’s Bohemia Manor plantation lay close to my home in Delaware and maps were always a delight to me so it is not strange that I wrote a column about the map that made Herrman famous, published February 10, 1962. Having a copy of Augustine Herrman’s map, the Library of Congress thinks, is something to crow about. There are only four other copies of the original printing in 1673 known to exist and only one other is in America—at the John Carter Brown Library, in Providence, Rhode Island. Two copies are in the national library of France and one is in the British Museum. Delawareans are interested in Augustine Herrman’s map because, for one thing, it includes Delaware, although it is labeled as a map of Virginia and Maryland. The exact title is a long one: ‘‘Virginia and Maryland As it is Planted and Inhabited this present Year 1670 Surveyed and Exactly Drawne by the Only Labour & Endeavour of Augustine Herrman Bohemiensis.’’ Delawareans are also interested in Herrman’s map because of the author. Herrman’s manor, Bohemia, in Cecil County, backed up into Delaware, where he and his descendants (in blood or in property) became important as landholders and otherwise. Bayards and Claytons, for example, among the princely families of Delaware politics, became inheritors of parts of Bohemia. Even the old patriarch’s name, fixed on the Cecil County map by Port Herman and St. Augustine, became lodged on the Delaware shore at Augustine Beach, where I used to go as a boy on the steamer Thomas Clyde. (Who, I wonder, was Thomas Clyde?) Herrman’s map according to the Library of Congress, is the second most distinguished map of the early colonial period of English America. The one map that is more distinguished is John Smith’s map of Virginia in 1612. And the Smith map, of course, is so old that it was drawn eight years before the Pilgrims came to Plymouth. Not one copy of Herrman’s map was known to be in America until 1929, when the John Carter Brown Library got its copy. The Library

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of Congress kept looking for one from the year 1897, when its map division was founded. A year or two ago two copies were discovered to be in the French Bibliotheque Nationale, and the Library of Congress immediately suggested purchasing one or trading for it. But both maps were in collections that the French weren’t permitted to break up. Then success came at last. A third copy of Herrman’s map turned up in the French library. It could be and was exchanged for an old chart of the Mediterranean which a friend of the Library of Congress (libraries cannot make out without friends) provided for this purpose. Now at last our greatest library can exhibit a copy of this historic map which, among its other uses, was employed in the settlement of the disputes over the boundary between Delaware and Maryland. Neither Wilmington nor Dover appears on Herrman’s map. It is too early for them. Dover had not been founded when Herrman’s map was printed in 1673, and Wilmington was only a Swedish hamlet. New Castle appears; so does the ‘‘Read Lyon’’ and Lewes, though not under this name. ‘‘Yron Hill’’ is also marked, and Crane Hook and the Christina Creek, but not the Brandywine, though the latter name appears upon shoals in the bay. The shores of northern Delaware are carefully drawn, but southern Delaware is only vaguely sketched. A Plum Point appears near Henlopen. Then farther up the bay shore appears a string of creeks: ‘‘Murther,’’ Wulfe,’’ ‘‘Duck,’’ ‘‘Black Birds,’’ ‘‘Oppoquenimin’’ (I am not sure that I read the spelling correctly), ‘‘Halfe way,’’ and once again ‘‘Read Lyon.’’ The edge of Cherry Island at the mouth of the Christina is labeled ‘‘Martins’’ Point. Of course it is the Chesapeake shore that gets Herrman’s prime attention. Delaware is just an auxiliary. In fact the name of Maryland is so sprawled over the map that at least Sussex County seems to be covered by it. And at that time most of Sussex was claimed by Maryland. Herrman did not know the shape of the shore line north of Chincoteague. He shows the Indian River but does not name it, and much to the south, names an ‘‘Assateacq’’ Creek but hardly shows it. No hint appears of the bays back of the Delaware beaches. Across Delaware Bay were the ‘‘Kahansick Indians,’’ and Herrman declares the southern part of ‘‘New Jarsy’’ to be ‘‘at present Inhabited Only or most By Indians.’’ On the peninsula a part of Accomac County is labeled ‘‘Arcadia,’’ a designation new to me. The ‘‘Wigheo alias Pokomoake’’

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Delaware Segment of Agustine Herrman’s Map of Maryland (London, 1673). Facsimile from a copy in the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island. Note that lower Delaware is considered part of Maryland. North is to the right. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington.

River is clearly marked and so is the ‘‘Wigheocomaco.’’ Indian towns are noted at the head of the ‘‘Choptanck.’’ No Philadelphia, no Baltimore (except the county), no Richmond. And on the site of Annapolis is Arundelton. Born in Prague, Bohemia, about 1605 to well-to-do parents who were exiled, probably as a result of the religious war, Herrman lived in Amsterdam before he came to America. Employee of the West India Company, fur trader, farmer, land speculator, Herrman was on the Delaware river as early as 1633 (before the Swedish settlement) when the Dutch were buying Indian lands on the site of Philadelphia. Many years later, after the Swedes had come and had been conquered, Herrman was sent by Stuyvesant to Maryland and Virginia to discuss intercolonial relations with the English. He liked the land he saw on the Chesapeake and determined to make it his home. In

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return for his map, Lord Baltimore gave him grants of land that totaled over twenty thousand acres. (Previously he offered to make Stuyvesant a map because the English maps were ‘‘prejudicial’’ to the Dutch, as well as imperfect.) Made a ‘‘denizen’’ of Maryland officially in 1659, naturalized an Englishman in 1663, Herrman settled on one of his grants, the six thousand-acre manor he called Bohemia. But years must have been spent exploring the Chesapeake for the accurate details of the splendid map that made this Czecho-Dutch Marylander famous.

Time to Revive the Hundreds? In forty years of lecturing on Delaware history no question aroused more mystery than the origin of the word hundred as applied to an area of land resembling the Pennsylvania township. My suggestion of a new political use for the hundred, in the next column, published April 14, 1962, aroused little reaction. The need for local government in the populous growing suburban areas around Wilmington—and to a lesser extent, around smaller Delaware cities like Dover—becomes increasingly evident all the time. Since Brandywine Hundred had over fifty-eight thousand inhabitants by the census of 1960, a greater number than were in the whole state at the time of the first federal census in 1790, it seems obvious that the very limited county government is hardly enough to take care of all Brandywine Hundred’s special needs. Yet no part of Brandywine Hundred except Bellefonte has an incorporated municipal government. Once upon a time rural New Castle County was properly regarded as the hinterland of Wilmington, an area supplied by the city and necessary to its wealth and its existence. Now that Brandywine and Christiana Hundred have more people than Wilmington, the former roles are reversed. Wilmington now gives them their reason for being; without it they would be lost souls, suburbs in search of a city. And whereas it once may have been fair for Wilmington to pay a tax to support county police and other services outside of the city, perhaps the county will soon need to rally to the support of Wilmington. The hundreds in modern Delaware have few functions. Nineteen of the thirty-two are representative districts for the election of mem-

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bers of the lower house of the General Assembly. The others are not much more than geographical expressions. Once upon a time they had a little more use—not much more, but a little more. Assessors were chosen in each hundred to determine the value of property for taxing purpose. Overseers of the poor were also chosen in each hundred, and so were road commissioners. Another hundred official was the election inspector, his main function being to help supervise the county elections. The inspectors and the other hundred officials were chosen at what was called the ‘‘little election’’ (still the Delaware name for a preliminary election) held in each hundred a month or so before the general election. Beginning in 1811, the general election was also held in the hundreds, one polling place being opened in each of them to save voters a trip to the county seat. The origin of the hundred is shrouded in mystery. We get the hundred from England, of course, but we cannot be sure where the English got it. When we first hear of it in England, the hundred was a geographic area, just as it is in Delaware today. This was after the Romans had abandoned England to Germanic invaders, the Angles and the Saxons. We suppose the Angles and the Saxons brought the term to England, and that it originated in Germany as a name for—and here there are two theories—the territory occupied by a hundred fighting men or the territory composed of one hundred hides of land, with a hide equaling about one hundred and twenty acres. There are still other theories of the Germanic origin, but a minority group of medieval scholars pooh-poohs them all and says the term is of Roman origin. Some of these men say the hundred somehow developed from the Roman ‘‘centuria,’’ a unit of a hundred soldiers and also a Roman voting division. At any rate the term was transported to England, probably from Germany, before the Danish invasion of the eighth century. Each English hundred had a court where all the freemen met monthly and chose a ‘‘hundred man’’ who had some executive duties and presided at the meeting (like the inspector at a ‘‘little election’’ in a colonial Delaware hundred). In time a group of twelve men came to represent all the others and administer justice and also help in the collection of revenue—a function possibly having some connection with that of the hundred assessor of colonial Delaware. Gradually the usefulness of the hundred decreased as the county became more important. By Elizabeth’s day the hundred was practi-

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cally useless, though it lingered on for three more centuries. At last in 1867 the hundred was abolished in England. Today it survives, so far as I know, only in Delaware. In most American colonies the town or township became the subdivision of the county. This is the term William Penn used in his early regulations for Delaware. But the hundred had apparently sneaked into Delaware in the minds and vocabulary of settlers who came here before Penn. The first use of the term I know of was in 1687 in reference to Duck Creek Hundred. Ninety years after its first known use, the word is employed by the legislature in 1775 when the Sussex County justices of the peace are ordered to ascertain the bounds of ‘‘the ancient hundreds’’ and ‘‘lay out such and so many new hundreds (on land just acquired from Maryland after Mason and Dixon’s survey) as may be found necessary and convenient.’’ The ‘‘freeholders and other electors’’ should ‘‘choose their own Inspectors and Assessors’’ in the presence of two appointed freeholders, who were also to maintain and support the poor and the public roads. It seem to me that it may now be ‘‘necessary and convenient’’ to make some use of the hundreds once again, not for support of the poor but for other tasks of local government.

A Melancholy Note from Breck’s Mill’s Past The story of George B. Milligan recounted here came to me when I was writing a biography of Louis McLane, Milligan’s brother-in-law. Another Milligan, John J., a brother of George and of Mrs. Catherine McLane, was prominent in Delaware political affairs as a four-term member of Congress, 1831–1839. This column appeared in The Wilmington Morning News on May 26, 1962. As far as I know there is no other account of this episode in print. On summer evenings twenty years or so ago I often used to drive to Breck’s Mill to hear the Brandywiners rehearsing. I pass that handsome mill less often now, and when I do I think of the sad life of George Baldwin Milligan. Milligan was the son of a gentleman lawyer of Philadelphia who owned a plantation called Bohemia in Cecil County, Maryland, and a house in Wilmington, and of his bride Sarah Jones, daughter of a well-to-do family of lower New Castle County. When George was still

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young, both his parents died, leaving him Bohemia and three thousand dollars. This was a substantial bequest, but George was improvident. He traveled for pleasure and on public service, he mortgaged Bohemia, and he invested in mills on the Brandywine. In May 1813, with the commission of colonel but without any stipend, young George Milligan sailed from New Castle for St. Petersburg, Russia, on the Neptune, Captain Lloyd Jones commanding, as aide to Senator James Bayard, his father’s neighbor, attorney, and close friend, who was going abroad as peace commissioner. The mission took more than two years. Bayard and Milligan went to Gothenburg, Riga, Ostend, Ghent, Paris and London, as well as St. Petersburg, and wherever they went, they lived, perforce, expensively. Picture the older man and the young one in St. Petersburg on September 17, 1813 (according to Bayard’s diary), strolling ‘‘down the Boulevard, a fine graveled walk extending from the Neva (River) to St. Isaac’s Church, then passing in front of the Admiralty to the Winter Palace.’’ Or wandering on June 21 with Albert Gallatin and George Dallas (later a vice president) through the streets of Gothenburg and observing that there was an open market, ‘‘like that of Dover, Del.’’ Unfortunately, Bayard died a week after their return to Wilmington, and Milligan was left without his older friend’s advice when he needed it. Before this trip, in 1812, George Milligan had purchased the property around Breck’s Mill from the heirs of Vincent Gilpin. Enterprise was in the air. Another young mill owner named E. I. du Pont was expanding his holdings down the Brandywine and bought a strip of Milligan’s land along Squirrel Run. The husbands of Milligan’s two pretty sisters were also interested in Brandywine milling. Across the stream from Breck’s Mill lay a factory (Walker’s mill), owned by Joseph Sims, a rich Philadelphia merchant whose son married one of George Milligan’s sisters. The other sister married Louis McLane, a young attorney, who was George Milligan’s partner in the Brandywine purchase, which they called Rokeby, after a narrative poem by Walter Scott, who was then the rage. Unlike du Pont, Milligan and McLane did not themselves operate their mill. Milligan went off to Europe, and McLane was busy beginning a career in law, banking, and politics. For a time all went well. During the War of 1812 when imported goods were hard to find there was a demand for American textiles.

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But after the war was over, cheap British cloth flooded the country and American millers were ruined. To make matters worse, there was a second type of flood, high water in the Brandywine, which damaged the mill and its spindles. McLane and Milligan tried to sell out, but for years they could not find a buyer. Romantic Rokeby must have come to have an unhappy sound to them. George, disappointed in business and also in love, forsook his native environs and sailed to Louisiana to become a planter. His fortune was gone; his Maryland lands, heavily mortgaged to the Tatnalls, were sold to Louis McLane, whose legal business sustained him despite the losses at Rokeby. In Louisiana, George Milligan began to reconstruct his fortune and his domestic hopes. He became a prosperous planter, and he married Mary Urquhart, who came of a wealthy family that was as much at home in Paris as in New Orleans. Their first child was named Bayard, and with wife and child George Milligan visited Wilmington in 1829. He was about to return by ship from New York to Louisiana when a dreadful calamity occurred. His coach was driven, by mistake, on to the wrong New York pier. When the driver tried to turn around in a hurry, the horses were frightened and the carriage was upset into the river. George, his son, a nurse, and the coachman were saved, but his wife was drowned. ‘‘A melancholy accident,’’ the newspapers called it. In his pocket when he plunged into the river, George Milligan had an unfinished letter to his sister, Catherine McLane, which he had intended to send ashore with the pilot. Now when the shock began to wear off he drew it out, dried it, and added a long mournful note. ‘‘My dear Sister. I have a tale of horror to communicate; and yet have nerve to do it. My poor dear wife is lost to me forever . . .’’

A Capsule History of Delaware When I read over the following column and noticed the question in the final paragraph, I thought that probably an unanticipated event, the rise of the banking industry, had been the prominent local development in the last half century. In that case the plastic credit card would be its symbol. But for the most memorable figure of the age I would suggest Louis Redding, not a financier, because I think the lasting effect of Redding’s work to end segrega-

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tion in education surpasses other features of the last half century. This column was published December 5, 1964. Officially the great event in the history of our state was the ratification of the Federal Constitution on December 7, 1787. Most Delawareans know that Delaware was the first state to accept the Constitution. The date is kept before them not only by the activities of a Delaware Day committee set up by the legislature but also by the state flag, on which the date appears below the coat of arms. The significance of the date does not lie in the act of ratification alone but also in the fact that this act was the culmination of the revolutionary era, of the winning of independence, which was not safe till a stable government was formed. If this was the great event in Delaware history, I wondered as I prepared a talk to newcomers, what other major events should be noted in a very short capsule history of Delaware? As an experiment, I divided the history of Delaware into blocks of time, each a half century long. And for each half century, I tried to find one event, one symbol, and one man who would represent the period. In the first half century, 1600–1650, the great event was the coming of the Europeans—Dutch and Swedes and Finns. The Indians who were here already were late Neolithic men, representing another epoch in time. The Delaware of our times is closer to Chaucer’s England and St. Louis’ France, or even Caesar’s Rome and Pericles’ Athens, than to the so-called redmen. The Zwaanendael Museum, though a modern reconstruction of a building that never stood in Delaware, is symbolic of this age and of its European roots. And Johan Printz, who kept New Sweden alive, seems to me a symbolic man of this time. In the second half century, 1650–1700, the great event was the English conquest of 1664. Little attention has been given it here on this, its tercentennial, but it is important. Had this land remained Dutch, its history would have been vastly different. Symbol of the time is the Green at New Castle, laid out by order of the last Dutch governor but almost at once the center of English authority in our river valley. William Penn, who landed at New Castle in 1682 to take possession of this land, is the half century’s great figure. Neither he nor Printz made his American home in Delaware, but Delaware in their time was hardly an entity in itself. In the next half century, 1700–1750, the important development

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was the separation of Delaware from Pennsylvania, which occurred in 1704 when the Three Lower Counties of Penn were granted an assembly of their own. The symbol of this age is the old New Castle Court House, where this colonial assembly sat and enacted statutes that gradually completed the separation that history and culture had brought about. The chief figure of the time might be Jasper Yeates, a forgotten colonist who was leader of the resistance of the Lower Counties to continued union with the province of Pennsylvania. Yeates seems actually to have conspired with crown officers to remove these counties from any connection with the Penn proprietorship, a plan that was unsuccessful, for Delaware and Pennsylvania continued to share the same governor throughout the colonial period. The next half century, 1750–1800, is the period when the winning of independence, with its culmination in the ratification of the Constitution, is the great event. The symbol of this era is the old State House at Dover, capitol of the new state. As the representative man of his age, I suggest Caesar Rodney, last speaker of the colonial assembly and our wartime governor and commander in chief. In the half century from 1800 to 1850 the great event was the Industrial revolution, the beginning of manufacturing particularly in northern Delaware. Its symbol is the Hagley Museum, an old mill of many purposes beside the Brandywine, the preeminent milling stream. The Hagley Museum serves doubly its function, both in itself and in the exhibits it houses today. As man of the age, E. I. du Pont seems a logical choice. A manufacturer, he also represents the new wave of immigrants to Delaware from foreign lands—men who found here the better life they sought. From 1850 to 1900, the great event was the Civil War and the resultant abolition of slavery in Delaware. Bleak Fort Delaware, built earlier and rebuilt later, stands as a symbol of this period, in which it won its chief portion of fame as a prison camp. As man of the era I nominate Thomas Garrett, Wilmington abolitionist, because the excitement of the reform he represents runs through the period and affects Delaware life for decades after the war. In the half century from 1900 to 1950 the great development in Delaware is the rise of the chemical industry, its symbol the Du Pont building, and its most distinguished figure the business genius, Pierre S. du Pont. His public spirit and his benefactions call attention to the largesse, the bounty the chemical industry brought to Delaware.

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And what of the present half century, from 1950 to 2000? Can it be that its mark will be the transition of a state into a suburb? Will its symbol be the black-topped parking lot? I hope not. I hope that the preservation of Brandywine Village and the Boyce House, and Odessa and Allen McLane’s grave and the Dickinson house and Trap Pond, to name a few, are indications that our age will not be an ugly one.

The Nicholites: ‘‘Believers in the Light’’ I had almost forgotten the Nicholites until I came upon the following column published April 10, 1965. Perhaps it will serve to remind us of a spiritual element in our history and perhaps also of the fact that many enthusiasms have a short life. The name of Joseph Nichols is hardly remembered today in Kent County, where he was born. Nor is this strange, for Nichols was no Rodney, or Ridgely, or Dickinson—not a man distinguished in county or state or national affairs. But he was an innovator—a man who introduced something new—and as such he deserves study, because innovators are, for better or worse, the men who make history move. Joseph Nichols was born near Dover in approximately 1730, and he died in 1770. For most of his life he apparently lived as his neighbors did. His wife, born Mary Tumlin, inherited 115 acres that they sold in 1764 to a man named Ruben Oliver. Later Nichols bought a 224-acre farm in Mispillion Hundred. When he was about thirty, Nichols was shocked by the sudden death of a close friend. As Nichols began meditating on the meaning of life and death, he did not abandon his friends, and their gatherings, but instead sought gradually to convert parties that had been entirely frivolous, featuring dancing, drinking, and games, into religious meetings. Delaware and the neighboring Eastern Shore were fertile ground for a religious revival in the mid-eighteenth century, for there was a great scarcity of religious leadership. In theory, most of the people belonged to the Church of England. This church depended on bishops for confirmation of members and ordination of ministers, but since there were no bishops in the colonies both the membership and the ministry suffered. George Whitefield in the 1750s and Fran-

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cis Asbury in the 1770s were able to attract large followings from neglected people of this area. Like Whitefield and Asbury, Joseph Nichols was not trying to win converts from one church to another. He worked mainly with people who had no religious connection at all, and like many other missionaries he began gradually enlarging the area of his preaching, crossing the line into Maryland and probably traveling north into Pennsylvania, urging a doctrine of self-denial upon all who would hear him. Nichols’s career as a preacher, cut short by his early death, lasted less than nineteen years. Yet his influence was so strong as to keep his followers united for decades after him. The authority on this movement is Dr. Kenneth L. Carroll, a professor at Southern Methodist University, whose chief work on the subject is entitled ‘‘Joseph Nichols and the Nicholites: A Look at the ‘New Quakers’ of Maryland, Delaware, North and South Carolina,’’ a slim book published by the Easton (Maryland) Publishing Company in 1962. The Nicholites were called New Quakers because they were like the Quakers in many ways. They were a very plain people, dressing in white to express their aversion to all dyed cloth. In their homes they used stools and benches instead of chairs. They were opposed to drinking, to frivolous talk, to the swearing of oaths, to use of a paid clergy, to warfare and to slavery. During the Revolution one Nicholite, John Dawson, a cartwright who also made spinning wheels, risked punishment by refusing to take continental money. The society was not formally organized until 1774, after Nichols’s death, by which time it had its greatest strength on the Eastern Shore, where members of the group built three meeting houses, including one near Denton and another near Federalsburg. Many Nicholites migrated to Guilford County, North Carolina, in the 1770s and others went on to the Peedee River valley in South Carolina. This Nicholite migration was part of a great movement southwestward from the middle colonies. Historians frequently notice the settlements of the Pennsylvania Germans (at Salem, North Carolina, for instance) and of the Scotch-Irish who moved down the great cart road from Carlisle, but little has been witten of migrations from the Delmarva Peninsula. Yet we know the farmland here was being worn out by bad farming practices so we can assume Delmarva farmers sought new farms in the Carolina piedmont, which was as far west as they were permitted to go. In 1775 the North Carolina Nicholites petitioned the legislature

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for legal recognition of their peculiar practices (their desire, for instance, merely to make affirmation rather than to swear an oath on any legal form). ‘‘Consider us,’’ they begged, ‘‘as a people who with Sincerety of Hearts Desires to live a just honest peacible quiet inoffensive life.’’ The North Carolina legislature did pass a law making special provision for ‘‘Quakers, Moravians, Dunkards, and Mennonists,’’ but no reference was made to the Nicholites. ‘‘We do profess,’’ the Nicholites claimed, ‘‘the same principals that the Quakers doth,’’ and it seems natural that in due time the two groups should have merged. In 1797 under the leadership of James Harris, a chief disciple of Joseph Nichols, a large body of Eastern Shore Nicholites were admitted to the Third Haven Monthly Meeting (at Easton) of the Society of Friends. Except for some holdouts here and there this marked the end of the society called Nicholites—‘‘not,’’ as their North Carolina petition explained, ‘‘that we gave our Selves the name but the man who was first in this perswation who lived in the lower parts of Pennsylvania Government on Delaware Bay and died in the same place, his name was Joseph Nichols and as he believed in the light that Shines in the understanding of man and woman that Discovers to them betwixt good and evil, right and wrong and reproves for evil and justifies for well Doing . . . and as he believed so he preached and we amongst many other Soules became believers in the light and in a reproachful revileing manner was Called Nicholites, as much as to say followers of Nicholses light, but . . . it maketh no matter to us what name we bear.’’

First Cape Ferry Had Trouble Too The revived Lewes–Cape May ferry faced difficult times until responsibility for it was given to the bistate authority managing the Memorial Bridge over the Delaware River. The earlier ferry is largely forgotten, as noted in this column on August 21, 1965. The J. S. Warden and the Queen Caroline are forgotten ships today, but at the beginning of the century they were famous vessels in the lower Delaware Bay, for they were the first ferries that connected Lewes and Cape May. The older of the two was the J. S. Warden, which began her ferrying service sixty-five years ago this month, on August 6, 1900. The

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Cape Henlopen Lighthouse. Built by Philadelphia merchants in 1767. The interior was destroyed by the British during the Revolution but soon restored. Photo taken January 15, 1926, three months before waves demolished the structure. Courtesy of the Delaware State Archives, Dover.

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run from Lewes to a pier on the ocean side of Cape May took an hour and a quarter and was mainly outside the capes in the Atlantic Ocean because the Cape May pier was at the foot of Broadway on the ocean side. The Warden was 176 feet long and had a capacity of 650 passengers on the Cape May run, though she had carried as many as a thousand passengers in her earlier service as an excursion boat on the Chesapeake Bay. The fare was fifty cents one way, and two or three round trips were made each day. Fruit, produce, and poultry were carried as well as passengers. The Cape May and New Jersey Coast Pier and Steamship Company were the operators of the Warden in 1900, and the whole enterprise was called the Queen Anne’s Connection, because the steamboat service connected at Lewes with the Queen Anne’s Railroad, which ran from Lewes through Milton, Ellendale and Greenwood to Denton and Queenstown (in Queen Anne’s County), Maryland, where there was another steamboat connection by the Queen Anne, to a Light Street pier in Baltimore. In 1900, the through trip from Baltimore to Cape May took a little less than six hours, the fastest part being the railroad journey across the peninsula, where the train sometimes reached the speed of sixty miles an hour. The longest section was the boat trip on Chesapeake Bay, but this was shortened in 1902 when the railroad tracks were extended twelve miles from Queenstown to Love Point at the northern end of Kent Island. Cape May businessmen thought the Queen Anne’s Connection would restore the popularity their resort had enjoyed with Marylanders and Virginians before the Civil War. Probably the connection did help to keep the Southern flavor Cape May has long had, but one problem after another beset the ferry service and it was finally abandoned in 1904 after lasting, off and on, for only four years. Trouble began even before the Warden operated on this run. The promoters first had to build a landing at Cape May, and they constructed a T-shaped pier jutting out from the beach a thousand feet, but only twenty-nine feet wide except at the end, where it was 150 feet wide to provide a steamboat wharf. The first steamer was a large sidewheeler, formerly on the Boston-Bangor service, but her captain allowed his ship, which had a capacity of 2,500, to make only one trip before he broke his contract. The Warden was actually the third ship on the run, but the first to

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make any success of it, and she was replaced in 1901 by a sidewheeler, the Virginia, which was considerably larger. In February of 1902, the ocean pier at Cape May was crushed by ice and then part was carried away by a nor’easter. In July of 1902, however, the Queen Anne’s Connection was resumed by a new vessel, the Queen Caroline, built in Baltimore precisely for this service and operated by the railroad company. On the Jersey side, the Queen Caroline used a new steamboat wharf on the Delaware Bay at the foot of Alexander Avenue, Cape May Point, not far from the wharf used by the famous river excursion boat, the Republic. A trolley car carried passengers from the Point to Cape May City. The Queen Caroline ran for two years, but the service barely lasted this long, for it did not pay. The Queen Anne’s Railroad went bankrupt in March 1904, and at the end of the following summer the Queen Anne’s Connection across Delaware Bay was permanently suspended. In 1926, a Baltimore group led by Colonel Jesse Rosenfeld hoped to revive the ferry service and proposed to build a new pier on the Jersey side of the bay by sinking three concrete ships there in the form of a Y. They bought one such ship, the Atlantis, constructed for the government during the First World War, and brought her to Delaware Bay. But the Atlantis ran aground on a shoal and proved too difficult to move. A wharf was built in Lewes, and a boulevard from Cape May to Cape May Point was paved. But the new pier at Cape May Point was never built and the project languished until 1964. This account comes from several stories in the annual bulletins of the Cape May Geographic Society, particularly a story by Robert C. Alexander in the June 1964 bulletin. According to Alexander, features of the trip to Lewes from Cape May in 1900 were the sight of Fort Veazy with its four cannon of Revolutionary times (is this Battery Park?), the hull of the tug Rattler on Lewes Beach, Cape Henlopen Lighthouse, Overfalls Lightship (fourteen miles out, but visible on clear nights), the Harbor of Refuge under construction, the new steam pilot boat Philadelphia, hundreds of peach baskets awaiting shipment, and old Lewes with its five graveyards (and coachmen who insisted on taking visitors to every one of them). Incidentally, an earlier railroad and steamboat connection at Lewes was supplied by the Junction and Breakwater Railroad from Harrington and Milford. This railroad reached Lewes in 1869 and a year later established a steamboat service directly to New York.

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9 Delaware as an Antique It was hard to think of a subject for an article Mrs. Harold Brayman requested I write for the Delaware Antiques Show Catalogue in 1965 until I thought of the subject developed in this short piece. I returned to another favorite theme of mine with an essay entitled ‘‘The Philadelphia Connection’’ in the 1970 edition of this catalog.

IN THE YEAR 1965, THE STATE OF DELAWARE, NOW IN ITS FOURTH CENTURY, can claim to be something of an antique. No one today would be likely to entitle an article ‘‘Diamond Delaware, Colonial Still,’’ as an author did in the National Geographic Magazine in September 1935; there have been too many changes in the last thirty years. Still, despite very rapid growth since the war, Delaware maintains a resemblance to what it was in colonial days. Remove the new paint and fabric and the original shade and construction can be clearly seen. The old frame is still there. It is a remarkable fact about Delaware that it was all settled in colonial times. When western Pennsylvania, western New York, and even western Massachusetts were still wildernesses, the shape of Delaware was filled out, from one end to the other. And like the lines of a chair, the boundary lines of Delaware tell something of its provenance. The circular northern boundary is a romantic touch, recalling King Charles II who formed it in 1681 by decreeing that Pennsylvania, his gift to an admiral’s son, should not come closer than twelve miles to New Castle. The straight lines at the other end of the state recall another style and another age. They were drawn in the eighteenth century in a Georgian era and served, like a proper expression of the Age of Reason, to apply sense and law to the conflicting claims of the Penns and the Calverts. The longest of the straight lines of Delaware’s border was drawn by Mason and Dixon, men of science, English surveyors imported 173

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for the purpose, and its completion put an end to a century of quarrels. The circular boundary, on the other hand, had very little function (it limited Penn’s holdings for less than a year) and was never accurately drawn. It might almost be looked upon as excessive ornamentation, a baroque element crowning the shape of a state that was basically Georgian. Within these lines, look closely for two symbols, two decorative devices that indicate remarkably well the course of our fortunes. One device is a chicken, a blue hen’s chicken, and we reproduce it often, particularly since 1939, when by legislative statute it was officially declared the state bird. It symbolizes both independence and agricultural progress. As every Delawarean knows, its origin was a compliment to the valor of our Revolutionary soldiers who were compared to gamecocks. And in recent years the symbol has gained a new kind of significance because the poultry industry has become, in dollar value, decidedly the most important branch of Delaware agricultural enterprise. It is also the latest in a series of agricultural bonanzas, some true and some false—the merino sheep, the mulberry tree, the peach, and the strawberry are other examples—that have periodically excited Delaware farmers with new hopes and aspirations. And it marks the transformation of Delaware agriculture from its once dominant role to its present garden or barnyard status beside a mainly urban, or suburban, culture. The second device or symbol indicative of the historic development of Delaware is the humble millstone—such a one as in my boyhood lay along the Brandywine at the end of Adams Street, a relic perhaps of Dr. Stidham’s barley mill. It holds memories of the origins of Delaware industry, of a time when mills to grind barley and wheat and corn were scattered over all of the state, from Elisha Derrickson’s mill at Rock Haul on the Indian River and Parson Thorne’s mill on the Mispillion to the Stalcop mill on Shellpot Creek and the Patterson mill on the Christeen. The early mills served an agricultural economy, the miller, in a sense, working for the farmer, but gradually the milling industries became more important and more independent. Paper mills, powder mills, and textile mills were built, particularly on the Brandywine and in due time these manufactures became the leading enterprises of Delaware. Both devices, the chicken and the millstone, emphasize materialistic aspects of the development of Delaware. For another view, examine three relics on the Delaware landscape, three churches representing not only the spiritual commitments of the people but

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also their cultural heritage, their origins, and the time and conditions of their settlement. Among a multitude of old and noteworthy churches, it is difficult to limit the selection, but as symbols three are sufficient. First, consider the most venerable of Delaware churches, Old Swedes, or, more properly, Holy Trinity. It represents the faith and convictions of the first permanent settlers (after the Indians), the Swedish founders of Wilmington. Built by their children and grandchildren at the end of the seventeenth century, it was originally a Lutheran church and it demonstrates the acculturation of this Scandinavian element. After more than a century of residence in an English colony, the congregation of Old Swedes did not hesitate when they found themselves unable to secure a new Lutheran pastor from Sweden. They did not even consider inviting a German Lutheran from Pennsylvania; instead they turned to the church of their English neighbors and invited an Episcopalian to their pulpit. The further history of this congregation illustrates the urban growth of Wilmington, for eventually a residential shift required construction of a new church on the west side of the city. It is fortunate that the members of the congregation had moved, for otherwise the old church might have been torn down to make way for a new one. A second church edifice worthy of particular notice is a humble brick meeting house in Kent County near Frederica. Barratt’s Chapel, as it is called for the prosperous farmer who built it, brings to mind the success of a group of Methodist missionaries who came to America on the eve of the Revolution and found an immediate and favorable response to their preaching among the country folk, largely of English descent, as well as among their Negro dependents in rural Delaware. The plain farmers, the yeomanry of Delaware, had been without spiritual leadership for generations, not because either they or the church leadership wished it to be so, but simply because colonial America was a frontier, and the number of ordained clergymen was too small and the conditions of transportation too poor to allow them to be served by the conventional church of their ancestors. Seeing the problem, John Wesley dispatched lay preachers, weak in training but strong in zeal, as missionaries who would travel through the countryside and minister to the people wherever they were to be found. In time well-to-do landowners like Philip Barratt provided permanent shelters for these Methodist meetings. Barratt’s

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Chapel is famous as the scene from which a call was sent forth for the convention that organized American Methodists as a separate denomination from their mother church, the Church of England. But in Delaware it serves to represent the rural Protestant tradition with its emphasis on new ways to suit the needs of a new country. Constructed in 1780, it also signifies the peaceful separation from England, of which the Methodist schism was only a small part, that was going on before, during, and after the military conflict. Old Swedes represents the seventeenth-century origins of Delaware. Barratt’s Chapel is a survival from the eighteenth century. St. Joseph’s on the Brandywine, on the other hand, represents the nineteenth century. It was built by manufacturers as a church for the industrial laborer. It portrays industrial Delaware and the new waves of immigration of the nineteenth century. Founded when Catholicism was weak in Delaware, it has survived to see its denomination become the largest in Delaware. Founded in the green countryside when countryside was the most plentiful feature of the Delaware landscape, it has survived to witness an urban growth so vigorous and pulsating that it is sweeping over the countryside and threatening to convert northern Delaware into one great suburb. Founded for immigrant workers, it bears witness to the social fluidity of the open American society these nineteenth-century immigrants were happy to find. Curve and straight line, chicken and millstone, Old Swedes, Barratt’s Chapel, and St. Joseph’s are the shapes, devices, and structures which, when properly understood, can explain the development of modern Delaware.

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10 Separation Day In Federalist Delaware, page 15, I noted that June 15, 1776, was an important date in Delaware history because it was then that Delaware separated its government from any dependence on British authority. William P. Frank, an astute Wilmington newspaperman, seized upon this date and called for celebration of June 15 as Separation Day. Responding to Frank’s recommendation, those planning a June 1973 meeting in Delaware of the Bicentennial Council of the Thirteen Original States made its highlight a Separation Day ceremony in front of the Old Court House in New Castle. After Governor Sherman Tribbitt and other notables had spoken, I presented the following account of the historic events being celebrated. It was published in the First State Bicentennial Newsletter (undated but apparently 1973).

IN THIS STATE, IN THIS TOWN, IN THIS BUILDING 197 YEARS AGO, THE REPREsentatives of the people of Delaware declared their independence of all foreign authorities and asserted the sovereignty of their own government. This was a revolutionary step; indeed it was the ultimate revolutionary step. It followed, of course, upon a series of provocations. Most directly it followed the provocation of an event in the fall of 1773, two hundred years ago this year—the Boston Tea Party. When Britain sought to punish the people of Boston by depriving them of their livelihood and their government—closing the port of Boston and barring the legislature of Massachusetts from meeting— other colonies rallied to the support of Massachusetts. In Delaware mass meetings in each county called for a special meeting of the assembly—an illegal meeting because not called by the governor, who was an Englishman. This illegal meeting, calling itself a convention, was held here on August 1, 1774. With Caesar Rodney presiding, three delegates were chosen to a Continental Congress in Philadelphia: Thomas McKean, 177

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who had read law here in New Castle; George Read, who lived here; and Caesar Rodney, of Kent County, who presided in this building at the most important meetings held here. Though the First Continental Congress had no success with the petitions for redress of grievances that it sent to Britain, still there was hope of reconciliation in Delaware. The three delegates to Congress were instructed, on their reelection in March, ‘‘to avoid everything disrespectful or offensive to our most gracious sovereign,’’ King George III, and to seek a restoration of harmony between the colonies and the mother country. But fighting broke out the next month in April 1775, at Lexington. A continental army was thereupon created by Congress, and a Virginia congressman, George Washington, was sent to Massachusetts to take command of this army outside Boston. Delaware joined in supporting these military measures. Yet as late as March 1776, the Delaware Assembly was still urging its delegates to Congress to seek reconciliation with Great Britain. Other colonies and other men were moving further and faster than the Delaware Assembly. Many were affected by a pamphlet called Common Sense by a recent English immigrant named Thomas Paine. It did not make sense, he argued, to continue to speak of our loyalty to the king while we fought the armies and ships of war he sent against us. Why not be honest and forthright and declare our determination to be free? In Congress, in the spring of 1776, many delegates were ready to take final measures and declare independence. Debate on this issue was, however, postponed to July 1, 1776, because, as Jefferson said: ‘‘the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina [the Middle Colonies and South Carolina] were not yet matured for falling off the parent stem, but . . . were fast advancing to that state; [so] it was thought most prudent to wait for them.’’ Meanwhile, on May 10, 1776, Congress did pass a significant recommendation. Because the king has excluded the Americans from his protection, and refused to answer their petitions, but instead sent the power of his kingdom, as well as foreign mercenaries, against them, ‘‘it appears absolutely irreconcilable to reason and good conscience for the people of these Colonies now to take the oaths and affirmations necessary for the support of any Government under the Crown of Great Britain and it is necessary that the exercise of every kind of authority under the said Crown should be to-

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tally suppressed and all the powers of government exerted under the authority of the people of the Colonies.’’ McKean argued for this resolution in Congress. When it was passed, Rodney sent letters to his friends in and about Dover to bring pressure on the assemblymen to take the action Congress recommended, that is, to cut the ties to England and England’s king. To Dr. John Haslet he wrote, in particular, urging him to talk to attorney William Killen, to Dr. James Tilton, and to Caesar’s younger brother, whom he called Tommy, but to keep him out of it, since he was both a congressman and speaker of the assembly and did not wish to seem domineering. Why was Rodney so concerned? Because the problem of a permanent government seemed to him of first importance: ‘‘No prudent man,’’ he wrote, ‘‘would choose to Trust himself long, without the Security of a Regular Established Government. . . . When the people are accustomed to irregular Government, it is Exceedingly difficult to recover them to the love of order and obedience to those Laws which are the Essential bonds of Society. Bad habits in the political, as well as the Natural Body, are Verry Easy to be acquired and verry hard to be Eradicated.’’ We must set up a government of our own, he argued: ‘‘The Continuing to Swear Allegiance to the power that is Cutting our throats . . . is Certainly absurd. The Colony of Rhode Island has [repealed its] Act securing to the King the Allegiance of the People of that Colony. Massachusetts has done the Same.’’ Rodney’s friends set to work to have Delaware do likewise. When the assembly met in New Castle on June 11, 1776, only a few days passed by before Congressman McKean, who was, like Rodney, also an assemblyman, read the May 10 resolution of Congress in the assembly and recommended that the members of this legislative body act upon it. And so they did. They unanimously approved the Congressional resolution on June 14 and on the next day, June 15, they moved that: Whereas it has become absolutely necessary for the safety, protection and happiness of the good people of this Colony, forthwith to establish some authority adequate to the exigencies of their affairs, until a new Government can be formed. Resolved, unanimously, That all persons holding any office, civil or military, in this colony . . . may and shall continue to execute the same,

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in the name of the Government of the Counties of New Castle, Kent, and Sussex upon Delaware, as they used legally to exercise it in the name of the King, until a new Government shall be formed, agreeable to the Resolution of Congress. . . .

By this measure the authority of George III and his ministers ceased to exist in Delaware. Governor John Penn, grandson of the founder of Pennsylvania, was set aside. The supreme authority in Delaware was now the General Assembly, and the first man in it was its speaker, Caesar Rodney. One more action occurred of significance here in New Castle on Separation Day. The instructions of the Delaware congressmen were changed so as to eliminate any reference to reconciliation with Great Britain. Now they were enjoined to adopt the measures ‘‘necessary for promoting the liberty, safety, and interests of America.’’ McKean and Rodney felt this meant supporting a forthright declaration of independence, and so they did early in July, a little more than two weeks after Separation Day. On July 22, soon after adoption by Congress of the Declaration of Independence, Speaker Rodney called the assembly back into session so it could pass legislation creating a state constitutional convention. This convention, too, met here in New Castle, beginning its sessions on August 19 and concluding them on September 20, with the promulgation of the first constitution of the Delaware State—and also the first constitution written for an American state by a convention specifically elected for that purpose. The regular government called for on Separation Day was now set in motion as soon as elections could be held under the new constitution. But the focal day for Delaware was this day, June 15, 197 years ago, when the power of the British government and the authority of the British king were both denounced by a people determined to govern themselves.

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11 The Old Collector (Allen McLane) In writing a biography of Louis McLane (1784–1857) I was tempted to write at length about his father, Allen McLane (1746–1829), who lived a long tempestuous life as a soldier and as a politician in Delaware after the war. In the first draft of my book I had two chapters essentially on Allen McLane, but the book was too long and I had to set about the painful task of cutting it. In retrospect I wish I had split my account into two books, giving the father his due and including the son’s congressional career, which ended in the same year as Allen’s death. Then a separate book could have been devoted to Louis’s career in the president’s cabinet, in diplomatic posts abroad, and in business. But I tried, not very successfully, to compress my story. Two opening chapters were made into one from which the following extract is drawn. Its source is Louis McLane, Federalist and Jacksonian (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1973), pages 3–38.

The Borough of Wilmington

THE BOROUGH OF WILMINGTON IN THE STATE OF DELAWARE OWED ITS life to its harbor. Down every street a gentle grade led to a river, the Christina (then called Christiana), a tributary of the Delaware. The Christina River and the harbor it formed were for a third of a century the domain of a cranky, courageous, spirited old man named Allen McLane. The borough that was the seat of his power from 1797 to 1829 was a cluster of buildings inside one of the arms of a V that was formed by the conjunction of two water courses. The stream forming the nearer arm, the Christina, to the right of the borough as one looked 181

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down from the hills behind, was slow, circuitous, and navigable. The left arm of the V was the Brandywine, shallow, rocky, and precipitous. The Christina wound its course through the farms and marshes of New Castle County past Wilmington to join the Delaware River; it was essentially a highway by which country produce left the farm and necessities and luxuries were imported, often via the great port of Philadelphia on the Delaware. The Brandywine was navigable only near its mouth, where it joined the Christina, just east of Wilmington and just west of the Delaware. Its falls were its fortune—no one great, spectacular fall, but dozens of small useful falls, one succeeding the other as the creek carried a dependable current southeastward from the hills of Pennsylvania. Fertile land, navigable water giving access to a major port, Philadelphia, and, via the Delaware, directly to the world, and water power to turn mills and manufacture natural products—wheat or wood or wool—these were the bases of Wilmington’s modest prosperity. Behind Wilmington, to the west at the open end of the V, were the low hills of the Piedmont’s edge. Before it, to the east, lay the Delaware, and, by the Delaware, the world. The streets coaxed boys to the sea to make their fortunes; the river brought the world’s goods to local merchants.

The Collector of the Customs Like Philadelphia, Wilmington is built in rectangular blocks back from a river. On the river front were the wharves and near them the shops of chandlers and other merchants dependent on the river traffic. Among the shops, near the wharves, at 16 East Water Street, was the seat of the major dignitary of the harbor, the collector of the customs for the district of Delaware.1 The office made any collector a person of consequence in his community. Collectors in great ports were, in effect, heads of large business houses who employed dozens or even hundreds of clerks and received a larger compensation than cabinet members. Wilmington was not a great port, but the compensation received by its collector was quite respectable. In 1801 the figure was $3,262.96, the adequacy of which may be gauged by comparison with the salary of the vice-president ($5,000), the chief justice ($4,000), the attorney general ($3,000), and the district judge ($1,200).2

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To be sure the collector’s income was less dependable than that of these salaried officers. Whereas Chief Justice Marshall was reasonably sure of his $4,000 a year and District Judge Gunning Bedford, Jr., of his $1,200, the collector had no such assurance. Only $250 of his 1801 compensation was in salary;3 all the remainder represented fees and commissions. He received a fee at every entrance and clearance of a vessel from his port: two dollars and a half, for instance, if the vessel was of one hundred tons or more burthen. He received twenty cents for every permit to land cargo, forty cents for every bond taken, twenty cents for every bill of health. Besides such fees, the collector of Delaware enjoyed a commission of 3 percent of all the money he collected as tariff duties or tonnage dues.4 The money that flowed through the port collectors provided the federal government’s chief source of funds in all but a few years prior to the twentieth century. And because the collectors were responsible officials with staffs adequate for their essential tasks, they were called upon by the federal government for many other local services. The main task of the port collectors was to police the entry and departure of all ships and their cargoes and to estimate and receive payment of tariff duties, or store the goods while taking bond for payment. They granted permits for the unloading and delivery of goods, employed weighers, gaugers, measurers, and inspectors, as well as the sailors needed to man any boats required for the collection of duties. They also provided scales and other equipment for evaluating imports, and secured the use of warehouses for goods that were to be stored and bonded for the delayed payment of duties.5 Whenever the country became involved in an international controversy, the responsibilities of the customs collectors were greatly increased. The enforcement of the Embargo Act of 1794, the suspension of trade with France in 1798, the Embargo of 1807, the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, and the Embargo of 1812 depended largely upon the collectors. And by the Alien Act of 1798 the collectors became the official registrars of all incoming aliens, sharing with the district court clerks the responsibility for registering all resident aliens.6 In times of calm as well as of crisis, the collectors were assigned additional new duties. Frequently they were employed to collect information for the secretary of the treasury. Alexander Hamilton, in 1791, had asked collectors to send him such documents as they

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could gather concerning commerce, fisheries, navigation, and manufactures. Albert Gallatin, in 1809, requested information about American manufactures and the methods to foster and protect them. In 1829 the collectors were called on to gather statistics concerning the manufacture of salt.7 A miscellany of other duties came to the collectors. In 1790 they were declared pension agents and directed to pay the military pensions then being assumed by the federal government. In 1798 they were ordered to collect from every ship arriving from a foreign port twenty cents a month for every seaman employed, and to use these funds for the care of sick and disabled seamen. Under this law the collectors became the virtual directors of marine hospitals, and so they remained for almost a century. They were also ordered to observe all restraints, including quarantines, imposed by health laws of the states; and when in 1819 the first federal law regulating immigration required minimum supplies of water and provisions to be carried on immigrant ships, enforcement was quite naturally left to the collectors.8 If the collectors had many duties, they also had a great deal of influence. They were a focal point of federal patronage in every port. In 1801, for example, the collector at Wilmington employed an unnamed number of clerks and ten inspectors, some of whom functioned also as weighers, gaugers, and measurers.9 Not in that year, probably, but in later years he had the use of a boat, and therefore a few seamen enjoyed jobs through him. He placed advertising in some local paper of his choice; he rented warehouses for the storage of goods seized or goods bonded for the later payment of taxes; he hired counsel to press cases in court. The collector of Wilmington, declared Hezekiah Niles in 1804, had more ‘‘power & influence, as an officer than even our governor.’’ From the collector’s own wealth and from ‘‘the Number of men he now imployes in his Offical capacity,’’ declared Peter Jaquett in the same year, ‘‘he is inabled to take to the Election 50 Votes.’’ According to another contemporary, the collectorship in 1829 was the most reputable federal post in Delaware.10 Numerous claimants sought the post whenever there seemed the chance of a vacancy, even under a Federalist administration.11 Yet the very numbers of claimants helped defeat their object. ‘‘Why,’’ wrote Senator Thomas Clayton in 1825, ‘‘cannot the people of Wilmington unite on some one man?’’12 The result was that though

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many people sought the post one man retained it for thirty-two years.

An Old Continental Soldier The collector of Wilmington was an important figure in the community not only because of the office he held but because of his own character and history. ‘‘In the name of God Amen!’’ he began his will: ‘‘I Allen McLane of the Borough of Wilmington in the State of Delaware, Collector of the Customs of the United States for the Delaware District and friend and soldier of the American Revolution.’’13 In a letter ten years before he died, the collector described himself as ‘‘an Old Continental Soldier’’ and told how he and his military comrades ‘‘waided through a Seven Years War, waisted our Patrimony and fortunes, and was Disbanded with Broken Constitutions and broken hearts, returned to our famillies to waid through the vile mire of Dependence, [the] Scoff of some and ridicule of Others.’’14 Only in its implication of a broken constitution does Allen McLane’s statement seem to be untrue. Or, if his constitution was broken, it remained formidable, for he lived to be eighty-two and at that age visited Washington to see the inauguration of his last military idol, Andrew Jackson. He was certainly an old continental soldier, the veteran of a hundred skirmishes on land and sea. In a war of seven years he had been in every major engagement and dozens of minor ones from Long Island to Virginia. By his own testimony the war had wasted his patrimony, and after disbandment he had known the pains of dependence as he struggled for a living. Scoff and ridicule had been and were his. When he was in his eighty-second year, a partisan Wilmington newspaper attacked him unmercifully: ‘‘What can be more disgusting,’’ asked the editor of this anti-Jackson sheet, ‘‘than to see this old dotard [Allen McLane], with one foot in the grave, boring steam-boat passengers with importunities to hear extracts from Wilkinson’s [General James Wilkinson’s] Memoirs, into which the name of the imbecile old man has by some accident crept.’’15 But scoff and ridicule were not the whole of his reward. ‘‘I have,’’ he declared in 1815, ‘‘by Industry acquired Houses and lots’’ worth ten thousand dollars. Though he lived long and made a number of

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gifts to children and grandchildren, his estate after his death was valued at $5,365.16 Nor was his only reward financial. His long life brought him many honors as one of the last surviving officers of the Revolution. He attended fetes at Yorktown and Richmond in 1824.17 He dined in Baltimore with other Revolutionary veterans in 1826.18 When Lafayette revisited America in 1824 and came on his triumphal progress to the boundaries of Delaware, there, at the head of the welcoming committee, according to Lafayette’s secretary, ‘‘General Lafayette recognized with pleasure Captain McLane, who commanded with great intrepidity under his orders, a company of partizans during the campaign of Virginia, and who at this time in spite of his 80 years of age, came to receive him on horseback, wearing the revolutionary hat and feather.’’ When, in the next year, Lafayette toured the battlefield of Brandywine, where he had been wounded, his escort was led by the oldest Revolutionary veterans of the area, of whom one was ‘‘Colonel McLean.’’19 Of all the joys of pride that Allen McLane experienced toward the close of his life, the greatest, unquestionably, arose from the repute of one of his sons, ‘‘the never-enough-to-be-admired’’ Louis, whom he had named for the King of France out of a soldier’s gratitude to an ally.20 For Louis, by the time of his father’s death, had been a representative, was a senator, and perhaps the highest post of all was not beyond him. John Quincy Adams heard the story of Louis’s naming but thought it was for the King of France’s son, not the king himself, that Louis McLane was named. So ‘‘Louis the Dauphin’’ Adams called him, and he intensely hated the rising young man.21 However his name originated, ‘‘the Dauphin’’ was a good title. Louis McLane was, his father hoped, to succeed him in the reputation and eminence the old man had gained through a hundred battles in nearly a hundred years.

Ancestors The best prospect in Scotland, said Dr. Samuel Johnson, in crushing retort to Boswell, is the road to London. Had Dr. Johnson been less unfriendly to America, he might have admitted that the road to the New World also offered the eighteenth-century Scot a bright

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Allen McLane (1746–1829). From Louis McLane Federalist and Jacksonian by John Munroe (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1973). Oil portrait attributed to Charles Willson Peale, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

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prospect. It was this prospect, undoubtedly, that drew the McLanes to America from the bleak soil of the Inner Hebrides. For the McLanes were Highlanders, members of the Clan Maclean that based its strength on the islands of Mull and ColI. The collector’s father is said to have been born Allan Maclean on ColI or Mull in about 1719,22 but whatever the ancestral spelling of his name, he signed it Allen McLeane when he made out his will in 1775, a year before he died.23 By family legend he migrated first to the Isle of Man, then to Ireland, and then to America in 1740 or a few years earlier.24 With him came an older brother Neil—Neil was the third son and Allen the fourth, apparently—but Neil returned to Scotland. Whether he came from Ireland or directly from Scotland, it was not strange that Allen McLeane settled in Philadelphia, for Philadelphia was a major entry port for Scottish immigrants in the eighteenth century. Great numbers of them went westward, to take up land in the valleys at the foot of the Appalachians, but Allen McLeane married a girl from the Falls of the Schuylkill, Jane Erwin, daughter of Samuel Erwin, a Scotch-Irish immigrant farmer, and stayed to practice his trade of skinner and leather-breeches maker near the colonial metropolis. Allen and Jane had at least three children. The youngest, a daughter, Anne, born in 1754, married Isaac Lewis, a lawyer of Philadelphia. The other two children were boys, Allen and Samuel.25 Both boys learned the trade of their father, but Samuel the middle child, born in 1750, seems to have followed it consistently. He lived in Philadelphia, where he was an officer in the militia, but like his brother he married a Kent County girl. Elizabeth Miller McLane was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and sister of a distinguished physician (Dr. Edward Miller) and a distinguished scholar (the Reverend Samuel Miller). It was generally thought that Samuel McLane had married above his station.26 A family legend declares that the elder brother changed the spelling of his name to Allen McLane during the Revolution, in order to avoid any chance of confusion with the British Colonel Sir Allan Maclean.27 This distinguished officer played a major role in saving Canada from the American invasion of 1775; to the collector he was a renegade Scot serving a Hanoverian usurper.28 Although this story fits Allen McLane’s character (and from this point the spelling of his name that he adopted and consistently used will be employed), some change in the spelling had probably occurred already. Samuel,

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in 1768, signed his name McClane, but eventually accepted McLane as the spelling. Many other variants of the Scottish name—McClean, McClain, and McLain, for example—were used in America, but Allen McLane clung to this spelling of his name, though otherwise his spelling was, if still original, quite inconsistent. His descendants retained the last name as he passed it on, but they changed the spelling of the first name to Allan, and thus the name appears on this McLane’s gravestone in Asbury churchyard, Wilmington.

Philadelphia to Duck Creek Allen McLane was born in or near Philadelphia on August 8, 1746.29 By his own testimony he visited Europe when he was twentyone and returned to settle in the Lower Counties30 —that is, the three counties lying below Pennsylvania on the Delaware River, counties that were added to William Penn’s American property in 1682 by the Duke of York. Though Penn desired to merge them with his province in one government, they strongly protested against a merger with rapidly growing Quaker Pennsylvania because it would leave them in a minority position; and Penn reluctantly granted them their separate assembly in 1704. Still, one governor served both colonies, and their political connection supplemented by their geographical and economic propinquity on the Delaware encouraged a population flow back and forth between them. It was not unusual for a young Philadelphia artisan to move to the rich and neighboring rural county of Kent, where fertile wheat fields were augmenting the wealth of Dickinsons and Rodneys and Chews. Nor, since Allen McLane was a demonstrably bold fellow in other sorts of business, was it odd that this newcomer should court and marry Rebecca, the young second daughter of the sheriff of Kent, James Wells.31 Though in terms of money and education, Allen was probably as well off as his bride’s family, Scots and Scotch-Irish were looked down upon in the Lower Counties as pushing newcomers, and perhaps there were those who thought Rebecca Wells demeaned herself by her marriage. The Wells family had long been settled in Kent County, where it was, however, not much different from Allen McLane and his parents in its economic status. Before 1767, when James Wells was elected sheriff, he is mentioned in Kent County records as an innkeeper at Dover.32

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At about the time of his wedding, which was January 1, 1770, Allen settled at Duck Creek Cross Roads, now Smyrna, a small market town at the northern edge of Kent County in a rich agricultural region. Annually Duck Creek shipped forty thousand bushels of corn and wheat, plus barley and lumber, to Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and the Wilmington area in the years Allen McLane settled there. Residents called the little stream a ‘‘bold and . . . valuable water,’’ but bars of sand and silt that greatly hindered navigation were constantly forming near its junction with the Delaware.33 Duck Creek was not only a center of trade in the late eighteenth century but also a center of religious ferment. Most of the people of the area were Anglicans, but a shortage of clergy left them unchurched until Methodist preachers arrived in the 1770s to take up the slack. The greatest of the Methodist missionaries, Francis Asbury, spent more time in Kent County than anywhere else, finding the people ‘‘attentive and affected, so that, although they are rude and unpolished, yet God is able, even of these unseemly stones, to raise up children unto Abraham.’’34 Duck Creek became an early Methodist stronghold, the site of many of the annual meetings of the Philadelphia Methodist Conference.35 Here, in 1773, Rebecca Wells McLane, in Allen’s words, ‘‘Joined the Religious Sect Denominated Methodist Episcopal Christian Church.’’36 Through her Methodism we have one of our rare pictures of the historically elusive Rebecca and her family. Mrs. Freeborn Garrettson, sister of Robert and Edward Livingston and wife of a famous American Methodist itinerant, tells of coming to a quarterly meeting at the ‘‘little village’’ of Duck Creek and of lodging there with the McLanes. ‘‘A long table,’’ she wrote, ‘‘was set and elegantly spread with every thing you could wish. The lady received and welcomed us with the affection and tenderness of a sister. She appeared to be around six or seven and thirty, and very interesting. I found in her one of those persons to whom my spirit became united at first sight.’’37 If Mrs. Garrettson gauges the age of Rebecca McLane correctly, she cannot have been more than fifteen when Allen married her, for this visit took place some time between 1793 and 1797. And it would be astonishing to find that Rebecca looked much less than her real age, for her life had been filled with tragedy. ‘‘She told me,’’ Mrs. Garrettson’s account continues, ‘‘she had been the Mother of 14 children, three of whom only survived. But oh she said, I had a dear and only Brother, and if ever I prayed for myself, I prayed for him,

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but alas he is gone—he took away his own life,’’ and while Mrs. McLane was telling the story, both ladies dissolved into tears. When Rebecca McLane recovered, she continued, ‘‘Oh, said she, my dear Mrs. Garrettson, my affliction was so great that I had almost lost my confidence, I was almost overwhelmed. And my poor afflicted Mother he was her darling, a more dutiful child never lived.’’ Mrs. Garrettson visited Rebecca’s mother, who apparently lived not with her daughter but nearby. She ‘‘found her dressed, sitting in a chair with a fan in her poor withered hand of the use of which she was entirely deprived as well as of her feet, by the injudicious treatment of an ignorant physician.’’ While Mrs. Garrettson sat by her, Mrs. Wells told ‘‘a tale of sorrow and her fan was frequently raised to her face to hide her tears. Mr. Asbery, said she, was with me this morning—his prayer and his advice I hope never to forget.’’ The next day Mrs. Garrettson called on both Rebecca McLane and her mother to say farewell. The ‘‘afflicted old lady . . . wept on my bosom, . . . thanking me a thousand times,’’ the caller wrote. ‘‘I almost tore myself from her. With my heart greatly softened I returned to dear Mrs. McLane—she threw her arms about my neck and in a flood of tears cried out, I do love you most affectionately.’’ Mrs. Garrettson and her husband were both deeply moved as they left Smyrna and drove off to Dover. ‘‘It was almost too much,’’ she wrote in closing her account, the most intimate view we have of the family into which Allen McLane married.38

The Suffering Life It seems likely that his wife’s piety led Allen McLane to join the Methodists, though his adherence was not constant. In 1786 he gave the Methodists a lot in Smyrna for the construction of Asbury Church,39 and at about this same time he was an active sponsor of the construction of a Methodist college, called Cokesbury—for Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury—at Abingdon, in Harford County, Maryland. When John Dickinson made a gift to this college, McLane was one of the trustees to administer it.40 In moving from Smyrna to Wilmington in 1797, Allen left a Methodist stronghold for a city in which the Methodists were a small and contemptuously treated minority. The forty-nine white and thirtytwo black Methodists were tormented by ‘‘sons of Belial’’ who surrounded the church during evening meetings and raised such com-

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motion that women feared to attend.41 A committee of three members, including Allen McLane and his son-in-law, Edward Worrell, inserted a note in the Wilmington paper on September 24, 1800, to the effect that legal measures would be taken against offenders if ‘‘the infidel rabble’’ continued to disturb Methodist worship by such antics as ‘‘breaking the windows, stoning the preachers, [and] casting nauseous reptiles, insects, and other filth in at the windows among the female part of the congregation.’’42 As his position on this committee might indicate, Allen McLane was the leading member of the Wilmington Methodist society. Francis Asbury, for whom the church was named, stayed with him when he came to Wilmington, at least as long as the collector’s wife lived.43 He baptized the collector’s sons and then in time he baptized their firstborn, old Allen’s grandsons. ‘‘These people,’’ Asbury wrote in his journal, ‘‘have not forgotten the holy living and dying of their mother, nor her early and constant friend, the writer of this journal.’’44 It was Rebecca Wells surely who was the strong support of religion in the McLane home. After her death on May 11, 1807, the religious ties of the McLanes seem clearly weakened. ‘‘She lived the Suffering life of a . . . Christian,’’ the collector noted in his Bible; ‘‘[and] died in the faith, praising God.’’ But he could not refrain from adding another note: ‘‘[She] was interd in the Methodist Church Ground, [where] he Erected a tom[b] stone of Marble that cost 350 dollars—to her memory.’’ Before Rebecca died, Allen must have broken with the Methodists for a time. One of their sons told of the family’s attending ‘‘a celebrated Camp Meeting’’ near Dover in July 1806. Over three hundred tents were erected to house about seven thousand people, and half as many more rode in from the neighborhood each evening. The emotional atmosphere must have deeply affected the ardent old collector, but his son gave no indication of being moved by the scene. ‘‘Doctor Chandler,’’ he wrote, ‘‘presided, and when I left them on Sunday night at 12 o Clock, he had recruited (as he termed it) 843 new soldiers and promoted 325 old ones: e.i. there had been 843 persons converted and 325 sanctifyed!!! Father and Mother were both there, and from Fathers conduct there, I believe he will once more become a member of the Methodist connection!’’45 Fortunately, we know more precisely what the collector’s conduct was like from the reminiscences of one of the ministers: Allen McLane ‘‘was there on his knees wrestling with the Angel of the Covenant, with

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tears rolling down his cheeks for a clean heart, and he was made pure in heart and enabled to see God.’’46

The Partisan Leader ‘‘Friend and soldier of the American Revolution,’’ is the way Allen McLane described himself in his will, written thirty-eight years after the Revolution was over. He could not, of course, forget this great event of his life. Otherwise, his was essentially a modest career, though punctuated, because of his impetuosity, with some stormy scenes. When the Revolutionary War began, Allen McLane and his young wife were living at Duck Creek Cross Roads, where he had bought five acres of land in 1772 and was plying his trade as a leatherbreeches maker.47 At the call of Congress, seventy-one out of eighty male residents formed a military association, among them McLane, who armed himself at his own expense.48 In September 1775, he was appointed lieutenant and adjutant of a ‘‘Battalion of Foot Militia’’ raised in northern Kent County, but in October he set out for Virginia with a note from his commanding officer, Caesar Rodney, identifying him as ‘‘a warm friend to American Liberty.’’49 His first battle was at Great Bridge, outside Norfolk, on January 1, 1776. For the next several years there were few major actions he missed. He was in the Battle of Long Island as a volunteer with the Pennsylvania infantry.50 In the following campaign he fought in the engagements at White Plains, Trenton, and Princeton. His greatest fame, the foundation of his legendary reputation, was won as a commander of partisan troops, foot and horse, some of them Indians, operating around Philadelphia just outside the British lines in 1777 and 1778. So closely did he scout the enemy that in June 1778, when at last they left Philadelphia, he was in the city before they cleared it and captured a laggard captain and forty men at Dock Street bridge. Since his mother’s family came from the Falls of Schuylkill, Allen McLane was well acquainted with the terrain where tales of his derring-do in fifty-some engagements are almost endless.51 A remarkable escape from British dragoons was memorialized on canvas by James Peale.52 At least two historical novelists have used Allen McLane as a swashbuckling character in their fiction.53 Anecdotes about his adventures that circulated widely may have been elabo-

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rated in an old veteran’s memory, but the basic character of the rough, tough captain seems true. A characteristic story has McLane addressing his men during the hardships of the Valley Forge winter: ‘‘Fellow soldiers!’’ he is said to have harangued them, ‘‘you have served your country faithfully and truly. We have fought hard fights together against a hard enemy. You are in a bad way for comfortable clothes, and it almost makes me cry to see you tracking your half-frozen, bloody feet on the cold, icy ground. But Congress can’t help it, nor can I. Now if any of you want to return home, to leave the army at such a time as this, you can go. Let those who would like to go step out four paces in front— but the first man that steps out, if I don’t shoot him my name is not McLane!’’54 From 1778 to 1781, McLane served, intermittently, on the siege lines outside New York, much as he had earlier near Philadelphia. His most famous adventures while on this duty were at Stony Point and Paulus Hook (Jersey City), British strongholds on the west shore of the Hudson, where McLane’s skillful reconnaissances led to the success of bold assaults.55 For a time he was attached to Morgan’s riflemen; in 1778 he accompanied John Sullivan’s expedition against the Iroquois as far as Sunbury; in the fall of 1780 he was with Baron von Steuben and the Marquis de Lafayette in Virginia; in 1781 he was at Yorktown. In his record there was even a naval interlude, for in 1781 he sailed to Haiti as commander of marines on the privateer Congress. At Cap Franc¸ ois he informed Admiral de Grasse of Washington’s situation, and on the way home participated in a four-hour engagement as the Congress captured a British sloop.56 Even when McLane left the battlefields for rest or recruiting, he was likely to get into a fight. For instance, he aided in the defense of four British barges that John Barry had captured and run ashore at Port Penn, Delaware, in the winter of 1777–78.57 In October 1779, he was in the center of the so-called battle of Fort Wilson, caught in James Wilson’s house in Philadelphia when it was attacked by a mob blaming merchants and lawyers for skyrocketing prices.58 And even when he retired to Duck Creek, at the war’s end, McLane took up his musket and joined some neighbors in repelling a Tory captain who had sailed up the creek and seized two shallops loaded with wheat. He ended the war as he began it, a volunteer militiaman.59 Nor had he advanced far in rank, considering the length, the quality, and the reputation of his service. He was commissioned a

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captain in January 1777, and so he remained till his retirement, when he was made brevet major, an honorific title. Though most writers refer to him as ‘‘colonel,’’ this rank was not truly his until 1794, when he was appointed lieutenant colonel in the Delaware militia.60 His slow advance in rank was a sore point with McLane. The circumstances that allowed him opportunity for daring adventures and independent action also worked against his promotion. He commanded small partisan companies, unattached or but informally attached to larger units, and Washington opposed any enlargement of such independent forces as would have opened the way to advancement. At one time McLane’s company was attached to the Delaware regiment, but the regimental officers objected to the introduction of a veteran captain into their organization because his claims to promotion would interfere with the ambitions of their deserving juniors, who had already been denied promotion because the regiment was small. He was then transferred to Light-Horse Harry Lee’s legion, a very unhappy assignment for McLane.61 McLane and Lee had quarreled over Lee’s gambling when they were collecting provisions on the Delmarva Peninsula, and though Lee may have forgotten the incident, McLane had not.62 It probably rankled McLane that Lee, ten years his junior, outranked him and was wealthier, better educated, and of a higher social standing than he. The greatest immediate difficulty was the loss of freedom of action. With Lee there would be a sufficiency of action, but McLane would be fighting Lee’s battles, taking Lee’s orders, enhancing Lee’s fame. The situation was not made easier by the character of Lee, who was brave, daring, and intelligent, but unstable, a gambler and dreamer whose life became a bitter tragedy that led to self-imposed exile. In 1780 McLane appealed to Pennsylvania to ‘‘comprehend’’ him in its establishment, explaining that though he had entered the army when living in Delaware he was now a Pennsylvanian again, having sold his property in Delaware and moved to Philadelphia after that city was evacuated by the British. And though attached to Lee’s legion, he was the only officer in it not provided for by some state.63 Pennsylvania was no more eager than Delaware to make room for McLane in its table of organization. He was a veteran officer with a good record, he was eager for a promotion that he deserved, but

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these states were unable to gratify the wishes of all the good officers to whom they were already committed. A direct appeal to General Washington for promotion, addressed through Lee, had already failed.64 Hope bloomed briefly when Congress and the Board of War authorized enlargement of Lee’s infantry. However, Washington, angered at this enlargement of an independent legion without his approval, again turned down the promotions Lee proposed, including McLane’s. When a New York congressman wrote on McLane’s behalf, Washington made it clear that he had a high opinion of McLane and that his opposition was chiefly to the promotion of a young legionary, whose advancement Lee could be counted on to press if McLane were promoted. And though McLane was deserving, there were hundreds of captains who were senior to him.65 After Yorktown, McLane turned to the Virginia government for some compensation as a retired officer of Lee’s legion, but he found that Henry Lee had settled the legion’s accounts with Virginia without making any claim for him. The half pay received from Congress was of so little value that he agreed in 1783 to give it up in return for five years’ pay in full, trusting that this arrangement would serve to set him up securely in the commission business. He bartered his commutation certificates (which represented the five years’ pay due to him) for merchandise to stock a store in Duck Creek, and more money soon went after the first. In 1784 he received a final repayment for money advanced in recruiting troops and an allowance for pay depreciation—a total sum of $2,945, which was not, he declared, worth more than $300 in specie, less than his expenses in getting the settlement. In 1785 he received a warrant for ‘‘300 Acres of Land on the moon which he sold to two Specks . . . for 90 dollars.’’66 At Duck Creek, in Kent County, Allen McLane found that no automatic preference was accorded him because of his Revolutionary activity. In a private letter of 1785 a native of Kent County spoke of ‘‘the hard struggles the revolutionists have had to support their measures in this country’’ (meaning Delaware) and insisted that ‘‘they must have even yielded to superior numbers, had not the tide of the continent swept them along.’’67 No wonder that McLane found the people not disposed to trade with ‘‘an old Revolutionary Charactor.’’ He was even sued for seizure of horses and provisions while patrolling the enemy lines at Philadelphia but appealed to Washington and received a letter explaining that he had been ordered ‘‘to stop all improper intercourse between the City and Country and to

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seize supplies of every kind.’’ ‘‘To the best of my knowledge,’’ Washington wrote, ‘‘Capt. McLane made no improper use of the power with which he was vested.’’68

In Politics Despite such troubles, McLane persisted with his business. He imported rum and sheeting and sugar. He exported corn and wheat and other country produce. And he met various vexations: his vessels—shallow-draft sloops, shallops, that brought his goods from Philadelphia—were caught in the ice; his debtors were slow to pay; proper storage space was wanting or expensive; crops failed and ruined his market.69 Yet, or perhaps because of such troubles, he found time for politics. Men of Scottish stock in Delaware generally did. The Scots (most frequently they were Scotch-Irish) were such active politicians that Delaware politics often seemed to be a battle between them and the English. Since most of the former were Presbyterians and the latter, before the Revolution, Anglicans, the contest could also be described as one between the Presbyterian party and the Church party. Neither term was correct. Some Presbyterians and some Anglicans would be found in each of the opposing political factions at every election—but the bulk of the Presbyterians were on the opposite side from the bulk of the Anglicans. Partly this was so because the Anglicans represented an older group of settlers, those who had been in this colony through several generations. The Scotch-Irish, on the other hand, were the main immigrant group of the mid-eighteenth century. Because they understood the language when they arrived and because they often, indeed usually, were better educated than natives of America, they were able to profit from their interest in public affairs and push forward into prominent positions. Since many of these exiles from Ireland bore with them to America deep grievances against the English government, they were particularly inclined to support revolution against the status quo. Native Delaware Anglicans, on the other hand, little disturbed by English rule, almost unfettered by English control, enjoying self-government without even a resident English governor, were not so quick to see the virtues of revolution, not so sudden to take a rebel side in any crisis. These were the tendencies to be observed in political alignments,

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not the rules. And the alignments could switch any day or month or year, for there were no organized parties. Factions there were, cliques that fought each other for offices and power. Before the Revolution the Court party was the faction in office, and the Country party sought to take its place. Since the Anglicans had been dominant, the Court party was also the Church party. Since the immigrants were seeking power, the Country party was also the Irish party. And in their attitude to revolutionary effort to secure independence, the Anglicans of Delaware were apt to pause, to hesitate, to favor conciliation, to play a conservative role; whereas the Irish Presbyterians breathed blood and thunder, sought a hasty severance of connections, and seemed radical in their zeal.70 It was natural that Allen McLane, a newcomer to Delaware of Scottish descent and revolutionary ardor, should enter politics with the Country faction, the Presbyterians, the radicals. A legislature controlled by this faction made him a justice of the peace in June, 1785, and in the fall of that year he won election to the house of assembly, the lower chamber of the legislature. For a newcomer to Delaware he won election astonishingly easily, polling 688 out of a total of approximately 1,100 votes and standing third among the list of seven assemblymen chosen by the county-wide balloting.71 If Tories were as numerous in Delaware as was claimed and if ‘‘an old Revolutionary Charactor’’ was boycotted by them to the extent that he believed, McLane could hardly have done so well at the election. He outpolled John Patten, another Revolutionary figure, a former lieutenant colonel of the Delaware regiment. Patten, who stood sixth among the victorious candidates for the house of assembly, was later to become the first Republican congressman from Delaware. And McLane outpolled Dr. James Tilton, an outspoken Dover physician who was already a member of the Continental Congress. One political post led to another. McLane was not reelected to the legislature in 1786; records do not show whether he was a candidate, but it was a year of conservative victory. In November 1787, however, he was chosen by his county as delegate to the state convention that was to consider adoption of the federal Constitution. The convention met in Dover, Monday, December 3, and unanimously ratified the federal Constitution at the end of the week. This action made Delaware the first state to ratify the Constitution.72 In the next year, 1788, the legislature elected Allen McLane to the privy council, an elected body of four men with terms of three years who served as a collective constitutional guardian upon the actions

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of the chief executive, called the president. Early in 1789, in the election of representatives to the first Congress of the United States under the new Constitution, Allen McLane received a sizable number of votes, ninety, in New Castle County. The number of votes he got was remarkable because it placed him second in the poll, the top man in New Castle having only 162 votes, and also because McLane did not reside in New Castle.73 In 1791, McLane was back in the legislature, again a representative from Kent, and when the new legislature met, he was elected speaker of the lower house. His election to preside over the house of assembly signaled McLane’s change of alignment in Delaware politics. In 1785 McLane had been elected to the assembly by the votes of the Country party; now in 1791 he was returned by the Court party, which had dominated Kent County for the last few years. None of the Kent County delegates elected with him to the assembly in 1785 were his colleagues in the convention of 1787 or the assembly of 1791. The antiPresbyterian Court party’s sway in Kent was so complete that in 1794 a Republican complained that no Presbyterian had been chosen to the legislature from Kent for nine years—or since 1785.74 In 1804, a Revolutionary veteran jealous of Allen McLane’s political standing attempted to explain it. After the Revolution, he said, George Read, a New Castle lawyer who was the dominant figure in Delaware politics, decided he would have to get all the Tory votes to maintain control of the state. The Tories, said the writer, would naturally be on Read’s side politically, but they were disfranchised by a Revolutionary law called the Test Act, which demanded from each voter an oath that he would support the Revolution. All those who refused to take it—Loyalists and neutrals—were disfranchised. Knowing that these disfranchised voters were in a three-to-one majority in Kent and Sussex counties, and nearly equal to the rebels in the third Delaware county, Read got the Test Act repealed, and then, to put the best face on affairs, appointed three Revolutionary veterans to head the Tories of each county at the next election: his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel Gunning Bedford, in New Castle; Captain McLane in Kent; and a Captain Nathaniel Mitchell in Sussex. The Tories rallied so well to Read’s party, this calumniator goes on, that at the next election they produced more votes than there were eligible voters in Kent and Sussex. Of course, they won the legislature, and ‘‘by this Great Majority of Torys on the Legislator they Where enabled to do What they Pleased, and thier first Act was to Appoint McLain Thier Spaker and Counsler to the

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Govener. . . .’’ In these offices McLane ‘‘rigidly obayed’’ the orders of Read ‘‘and would not suffer a Singel Officer of the late Regement or a Wig to fill any office in this State, but assisted his Master to persicute them. . . .’’ Perhaps the worst charge this enemy leveled at McLane was not intended to be so critical: McLane cannot write well, he complained, ‘‘and altho Some of Us are not Good Clerks, yet any of Us are eaquel to Mr. McLain.’’75 The story that George Read picked him as a Kent County leader is, at its best, too simple to explain McLane’s politics. Read was an intelligent and able politician who would see the obvious advantages of having a man of Scottish name and Revolutionary record to bolster a party that generally lost the votes of the Scots and the veterans. But other factors existed to throw McLane into Read’s arms. Probably McLane’s marriage was a factor. McLane’s father-in-law was a sheriff, which suggests that he was a member of the Court party. Delawareans inherited their politics as they did their religion, and the Wells family, though only in-laws, were the closest Delaware relations that Allen had. We can speak more definitely of the influence of religion than that of family on Allen McLane’s politics. He was a Methodist, and all of the leading Methodists in Delaware became Federalists. The Federalists in Delaware were the English party, the Church party, as opposed to the Scotch-Irish or Presbyterian party. Delaware Methodists were largely of English stock and former Anglicans. In Delaware early Methodism, though an offshoot of Anglicanism, had arisen in harmony with the old church. Anglicans and Methodists, remaining friendly, both looked with some disfavor on the immigrant Presbyterians. Furthermore, Delaware Federalists developed from the moderate or conservative party, the party that was the less vigorous in support of measures for independence or measures tending to upset the status quo ante bellum. Their opponents were the more ardently revolutionary party, the more radical in respect to the issues of independence. The early Methodist preachers were Englishmen who remained loyal to their King, to whose constitutional system John Wesley himself had counseled obedience. Delaware Methodists tended to be neutral or lukewarm in their attitude toward the Revolution, and they found the Court party, the Federalists that were to be, the more sympathetic to their position. Allen McLane was lukewarm in neither politics nor religion, but when the Revolution was

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over, his religion helped draw him into a political alignment that his Revolutionary record made unexpected. Most of the veteran officers of Delaware, and particularly the veteran officers of the famous Delaware regiment, became active in the party opposing the Federalists, the Republican party. John Patten, a Revolutionary major and once McLane’s commanding officer, was the first Republican congressman from Delaware; Colonel David Hall was the first Republican governor; Caesar Augustus Rodney, son of Captain Thomas Rodney, was the first Republican senator. The first president of the Delaware Cincinnati, the society composed of officers of the Revolutionary army, was Dr. James Tilton, the violent Republican who wrote a scurrilous biography of the Federalist leader George Read. When Tilton resigned the office, he was succeeded by John Patten, who retained it till the Delaware society became defunct in approximately 1800. The Republican sympathies of the Delaware officers, many of them Presbyterians, are obvious: at a July 4 banquet in 1796, the Cincinnati toasted the French Republic, the Dutch Republic, ‘‘the patriots of Ireland,’’ equality, and ‘‘the extinction of Monarchy in essence as well as in name.’’76 Federalist celebrants would not have been likely to offer any of these toasts. How McLane behaved at these meetings, if he attended them, we may wonder. He was a member of the Cincinnati, and, after the Delaware society’s collapse, he transferred his membership to Pennsylvania, where he probably found the order more Federalist in tone. McLane had little reason to feel any close kinship to the officers of the Delaware regiment. They had never been very friendly to him. His company had been allied to the Delaware regiment for a very brief period only, and even that brief association seems to have been against the wishes of the Delaware officers. When Allen McLane called upon old comrades to certify to his Revolutionary exploits, it was usually men from other states upon whom he called. If various factors led Allen McLane to the Federalist party, it is clear that he clung to the party and offered it his service and that of his son because it served him well. In 1789, at the organization of the new government, he received an appointment from President Washington as marshal of the District of Delaware, district being the name given to the area of jurisdiction of a federal judge, which in most cases in 1789 was a whole state—and so it was in Delaware.77 This office brought McLane only a small revenue—$86.34 in the year ending October 1, 1792—but it did not demand his full time;

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he did not need to abandon either his business in Smyrna or his home.78 Besides his commission business and his federal appointment, Allen McLane found time for other activities. He continued to serve as a justice of the peace, and earned some money through the fees falling to that office.79 He served as a militia officer in Kent County, commanding the fourth militia regiment till he moved to Wilmington to assume the collectorship. He was an early member and in 1803 became president of the leading Delaware abolition society.80

The McLane Heritage Most of their fourteen children were born while the McLanes lived in Smyrna. The first born was James Allen McLane, who died in April, 1773, and was buried in the old Presbyterian graveyard at Duck Creek.81 Then there followed in fairly rapid succession Anne, Jane, Elizabeth, Rebecca, Louis, Samuel, a second Louis (the first having died), Mary, John, a second Anne, Allen, a second Mary, and ‘‘Betsy,’’ who was probably a second Elizabeth.82 There were many heartaches in the McLane household as eleven of these children died in infancy. The only children to survive were Rebecca, the second Louis, and Allen. Rebecca was the oldest of the three, born in February 1779, in Dover, which had been Mrs. McLane’s home. She remains a rather faint figure in the background of the McLane story, rarely mentioned, never described. She was married before she was seventeen, in January, 1796, to Edward Worrell, and by him she had at least five children: George Washington (a proper name for the first grandchild of a Revolutionary veteran), Edward, Rebecca, Elizabeth, and Priscilla. Edward Worrell, Rebecca’s husband, became a man of some prominence in Wilmington, Delaware. Perhaps he moved there with his father-in-law. At any rate, we know he was employed by Allen McLane in the customs house and that he was also an active member of the Methodist church. In 1810 he became cashier of the Bank of Delaware, the oldest bank in Wilmington and in the state, and he held this position till he died in 1830.83 Poor Rebecca McLane Worrell became an invalid, and her trouble was such that the McLanes preferred never to mention it. Letters of her brother Louis note an early illness and indicate she made a complete recovery by December 1805.84 In April 1815, however, she

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was admitted as a paying patient to the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, and her trouble was diagnosed in the hospital records as ‘‘insanity.’’ Her father conveyed property to his oldest grandson in trust for Rebecca, and when her husband made his will in 1829, he provided a trust for her under the care of the managers of the Pennsylvania Hospital.85 Rebecca did not die until 1851, but there is scarcely a reference to her in the surviving correspondence of her brothers, nephews, and nieces. The youngest of Captain McLane’s children, another Allen, also suffered from invalidism of a sort. Though he received a good education, married well—in the usual meaning of the term—and was admitted to a respectable profession, the practice of medicine, at which he seems to have had real ability, and though he showed considerable vigor both in politics and business, he was, in worldly terms, a failure. Again and again he lost his practice, in politics he never rose far, his finances were frequently in a precarious state, and his boys, once they attained maturity, sought new homes in the West. Drink was Dr. Allen’s curse, surviving records indicate, the crippling influence that kept his various endeavors from being successful. The older of Captain McLane’s sons, the middle of the three surviving children, was Louis, who was born in Smyrna on May 28, 1784, a date often given incorrectly in reference books as 1786.86 Neither his brother’s curse nor his sister’s seems to have affected him. Various complaints beset him all his days, and although he felt he was doomed to an early death, he lived an active, responsible life, and died at the age of seventy-three. His life was a responsible one not only because of the weighty positions he filled—representative, senator, minister to England, bank president, railroad president, secretary of the treasury, secretary of state—but because of the family he reared—thirteen children, of whom twelve lived to adulthood, with a number proving to be of remarkable vigor and acuteness of body and of mind. One of his sons became a congressman, a governor, and a diplomat—minister to China, Mexico, and France. A second became president of the greatest express company and one of the greatest banks in the West—Wells, Fargo and Company and the Bank of Nevada. A third son became the president of the premier American steamboat company in the Pacific—the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Two other sons won a measure of distinction, and several of the daughters married or begot distinguished men— one son-in-law was General Joseph E. Johnston, and a grandson was

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Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton, called ‘‘the alienist,’’ a precursor of the psychiatrist. From his father and perhaps also remoter ancestors among the Hebridean McLanes or the more obscure Erwins or Wellses, Louis did inherit a choleric temper, a vigorous spirit, and an ardent ambition. Probably it was less a matter of biological inheritance than of environmental influence, for Captain Allen would have provided lessons in pugnacious quarrelsomeness enough for several sons. Louis was not born at the time of his father’s daring and often obstreperous feats in the Revolution, but tales of them were familiar to Louis from his boyhood. He was reared amid business and political quarrels, and in his teens his father was embroiled in patronage struggles and tax suits growing out of his official position. To stories of Allen’s Revolutionary ardor were added accounts of recent exploits. There was the tale James Bayard told Richard Bassett, of how Allen McLane was visiting in the House of Representatives in the winter of 1798, when Representative Roger Griswold, a Federalist, caned Representative Matthew Lyon, a stormy Vermonter, while General Daniel Morgan, another Federalist, prevented interference. A man standing beside McLane wanted to go to Lyon’s aid, but McLane stopped him. ‘‘Some words ensued, and the fellow told Allen, he would spit in his face. Allen demanded his name and place of abode. The man gave his name and said he lived over the mountains. Well Sir, said Allen, I tell you if you spit in my face you will never go over the mountains again. Allen was highly enraged and he told me since that if the fellow had spit on him, he would have killed him on the spot.’’87 With such a father, it is not surprising that little of his mother’s meek Methodist resignation rubbed off on Louis McLane. But if his father’s pugnacity and quick-triggered pride were unhappy inheritances, the fighting spirit, the grit and determination that came with them, served Louis well. So did the physical resilience that carried him through wearing positions and trying situations, not without illnesses, for he had many, but with the strength to survive illness, travel, worry, and responsibility and live to seventy-three. And there were many more elements of value in the heritage of Louis McLane from his father. There was, for one, the Federalist party. Allen was an ardent, a vigorous, even a furious Federalist, and his services to the party gave his son a claim upon it. In any other state it would have been of doubtful value for a young man reaching the age of maturity as late as 1805 to have a claim for the support of

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the Federalist party. Not so in Delaware. This was the Federalist state paramount, and for decades to come the Federalists, under their own or other names, would control its politics and its offices. As a Federalist, Louis McLane won six successive statewide congressional elections in Delaware between 1816 and 1826. Federalism opened to him the path to Washington and to a national reputation. Had he been reared a Republican in Delaware, his chance of advancement would have been much slighter. Another element in McLane’s heritage, difficult to measure in its political effect, was the Methodist religion of his parents. To be sure, he seems to have felt little of their enthusiasm or their faith; his correspondence gives little hint of his personal views. Louis could be profuse in pious references to the Almighty, but he did not remain religious in any denominational sense. His Protestant spirit came to be deeply disturbed when Catholicism entered his family, years later, but one wonders whether he did not find Methodism too crude, whether he did not set it aside with the unexpressed scorn that made him so very careful of the orthography of which his father knew nothing. If the religious message of Methodism was wasted on Louis, his father’s Methodism furthered Louis’s career in a practical, worldly way, for as he established himself as a Wilmington lawyer it gave him a corps of rural sympathizers and potential supporters at the polls. It is impossible to say to what extent the Methodists did support Louis. In his campaigns the bulk of his support came not from Wilmington, where he lived, but from Kent and Sussex counties, rural, downstate Delaware. These counties were the home of Methodism, but they were the bulwark of Federalism too. At the least, his father’s well-known connection with Asbury and other eminent Methodist preachers, his status as one of the leading Methodist laymen, must have helped Louis get started up the political ladder. Similarly, Louis’s Kent County birth and his maternal relations must have helped his political career, but such help cannot be measured. The fame of his father’s Revolutionary military career was a heritage of perceptible value to Louis. In spite of the fact that many Delawareans were Loyalists or neutrals in the war, politicians considered it of great value to have a name on their ticket that brought recollections of heroism in the time of crisis. Four times the Republicans ran Joseph Haslet for governor, apparently not so much for any virtues of his own as because he was his father’s son, the son of Delaware’s most notable martyr of the Revolution, the colonel who

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stayed with Washington to fight and meet death at Princeton, although the other members of his regiment, their time expired, had gone home. Caesar Augustus Rodney, another prominent Delaware Republican, was the nephew and namesake of the Revolutionary governor, Caesar Rodney. With John Patten, David Hall, and Caleb Bennett, all veterans, available to the Republicans, the Federalists were particularly glad to have on their ticket a name associated with patriotic military exploits. Nor did McLane’s Scottish name harm his career. On the contrary, it helped him. Even though there was a considerable anti-Scottish and anti-Irish feeling in Delaware, it was prevalent mainly among Federalists, men who would set aside minor prejudices to support their party. In nominating McLane, Federalists were following a maxim of Delaware politics, choosing a candidate who would pull some votes from the opposition. And while the name McLane would draw some Presbyterian votes, its association with Methodism helped hold the votes of the rural English stock. Another heritage of value rested in old Allen’s friends. Three senators, Richard Bassett, James Bayard, and William Hill Wells, were closely associated with Allen McLane and inclined to oblige his son. Wells may have been distantly related to Louis through his mother. Bassett and the McLanes had Methodist connections, and Bayard, no Methodist, was Bassett’s son-in-law and Allen’s principal political patron. Through such friends Allen undoubtedly got his son Louis a commission as a midshipman, and then, when the sea turned out not to be the life for Louis, it was in James Bayard’s law office that Louis learned his profession. Not the least advantage Allen was able to bestow on his sons was the substantial property he amassed as collector, particularly in the years after 1797. It enabled him to send the boys to school at the Newark Academy, and the younger one to Princeton College, and to support them in the study of law and medicine. Through his life Allen was able to make a number of substantial gifts to his children and grandchildren, and at his death he left Louis five properties in Wilmington and all his personal estate. With this bequest to Louis came one rather rare and unusual item that was potentially the greatest prize—all his rights and interest in the ships Good Friends, Amazon, and United States, and their cargoes—these ships being those involved in the litigation called the Amelia Island cases (of which more later). In view of the size of Louis McLane’s family and of the small income, in relation to necessary expenditures, allowed

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by the government to congressmen, diplomats, and cabinet members, his father’s help and promises of future help were of great importance. Louis McLane may also have derived from his father an acute sense of the closeness of the family circle. Although Allen marched off to war and left his wife to rather slim resources for many years, this action derived from his ardent patriotism, rather than from any want of family responsibility. He seems to have been an affectionate, responsible husband and father, albeit often rough in his ways. And his son Louis was so much his boast that his paternal adulation became a subject for raillery in the community and abroad.88 Louis too showed affection and regard for the members of his immediate family circle. He gave his wife the sincere flattery of making her his political confidante. He watched with pride and love the development of his children, and rejoiced in their material successes, though his bad temper cost him some loss of their love. Unlike his father, he possessed both manners and features that were regular and even distinguished, but his interior spirit was rough and fiery and violent, and his anger could not always be repressed even within his family, though here surely his love was centered. Even the place of his birth was of advantage to Louis McLane. To be of Scottish and English descent, Methodist in religion, Federalist in politics, son of a military hero, and a Wilmington lawyer of downstate birth—this was a formula for success in the politics of the Delaware of McLane’s day. Though Louis McLane might move with merchants and manufacturers such as the millers of the Brandywine, he still had a claim to a rural heritage, to an understanding and fellowship with the rural gentry and yeomanry who were the major and dominant class in Delaware. His birthplace, though a town, was very modest indeed. The name Duck Creek Cross Roads betrays its rural nature; Smyrna, which it became in 1806, is the mark of its pretensions. The town grew on a tract called ‘‘Graves end,’’ where James Green began selling lots in 1768 because two roads met here. One from a landing on Duck Creek proceeded across the Delmarva Peninsula to the Eastern Shore of Maryland; the other ran from Dover, the county seat, north toward New Castle and Wilmington. Here on four and a half acres of land that Allen McLane, ‘‘leather-breeches maker,’’ bought of James Green on January 4, 1772,89 it is likely that Louis McLane was born twelve years later, and here he lived till his parents moved to Wilmington in 1797.

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How the McLane children were educated while the family lived at Smyrna is not known. The village had not more than one hundred houses, and in spite of what the gazetteers call its ‘‘brisk trade’’ with Philadelphia,90 it had no established school. Perhaps a clergyman supplemented his salary by schoolkeeping; perhaps the McLanes and other families combined to ‘‘board around’’ a hired teacher; perhaps some of the townsmen had ‘‘bought’’ a teacher, for it is said that Kent farmers used to watch for immigrant ships coming up the Delaware, and then ride up to New Castle and buy the indenture of some lettered Scotch-Irishman whom they could put to teaching their children.

Duck Creek to Wilmington More problems than his children’s education bothered Allen McLane during his residence in Smyrna. His commission business did not prosper as he hoped; his post as marshal brought him many responsibilities ‘‘but no profit.’’ Indeed, he complained to Washington, ‘‘the office . . . taking all things in to Consideration brings me in Debt. I cannot Get men of integrety to assist me as Deputy marshall if I wont Give them all the fees. . . . I have to neglect all other Concerns to attend to the duties of the office which laies at Extream parts of the State.’’91 The ‘‘extream parts’’ of Delaware were, of course, not very far apart, but roads were bad, travel in wet weather could be unpleasant, and the necessity of serving a writ in the southern part of Sussex County or northwestern New Castle could be a most annoying interference with his other business at Smyrna. The compensation for serving any writ, warrant, or attachment was only two dollars, plus five cents a mile for travel.92 Consequently Allen besought the president to ‘‘add some appointment of profit,’’ for which he would be quite willing to move, if necessary even out of Delaware to his native Pennsylvania.93 In 1797 the collectorship of customs at Wilmington fell vacant upon the death of George Bush, a Revolutionary veteran. Former senator Bassett hastily recommended his fellow Methodist, Allen McLane, for the place, and on February 27 President Washington announced the appointment. It was the last service the old general could perform for his partisan captain, for in five days Washington was to retire from the presidency. And, strangely, it almost amounted to giving McLane a partisan command over again, for it

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placed him on the front lines of the commercial wars that were to rage through the next fifteen years. It also forced him to abandon his home and his business in Smyrna. ‘‘Wilmington,’’ Washington told McLane, ‘‘will be your place of Residence Settled by Law, which I apprehend you will find a more healthy situation than [where] you have resided Since the peace.’’94 The point was well taken. Kent County, where Smyrna was located, was notoriously sickly. In the ‘‘inland part,’’ a physician explained, ‘‘heat and stagnation occur to exalt the noxious exhalations of our low grounds.’’ So this physician, Dr. James Tilton, like Allen McLane, moved from Kent to Wilmington, which lay, thanks to its hilly surroundings, in ‘‘as healthful a district of country as any in America.’’95 Allen McLane, with thought of his eleven lost infants, could sigh amen. And so, as he declared in his memoirs, he sold his livestock at a disadvantage and moved from a sickly climate to a healthy one. His new position took his full time, and he could no longer serve as magistrate and merchant on the side. Indeed, Washington, in his letter announcing the appointment, expressed a kindly personal wish that Allen might find it to his advantage to abandon his other pursuits for the support of his family.96 But he could remain active in politics. He had, of course, new powers of patronage. And he also had new obligations to the party and the persons who had provided for his promotion. Allen was vigorous and he was loyal, and his vigor and loyalty were placed at the service of his party at the very time when party strife was becoming more severe than it had ever been before. If as marshal, McLane had been useful as a despatch carrier through Delaware for the Federalists,97 repeating in party strife one of his duties in revolutionary war, as customs collector he was even more useful, for his position by the water made him a natural medium between the Federalist administration upstream in Philadelphia and the party downstream in Delaware. For example, he reported at length to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering on a visit Senator George Logan made to John Dickinson at Wilmington in the fall of 1798. McLane described those who attended a ‘‘Jacobin’’ conference with Logan at Dr. Tilton’s house and reported on Logan’s statements there. He even noted what Logan had declared in a barbershop. Wilmington was a ‘‘hopeless sink of Jacobinism,’’ in McLane’s words, but he would at least keep watch on it.98

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In the 1800 campaign the Federalists were reported to have sent Allen McLane back into Kent County to rouse the people against Jefferson by spreading a report that the Democratic Republicans would, if they won, ‘‘drown all the men, women, and children in Kent and Sussex.’’99 Like a proper Federalist, Allen McLane subscribed to a set of William Cobbett’s heartily pro-English American essays, published in London in 1801 as Porcupine’s Works.100 At home, he gave his support to W. C. Smyth, an experienced Wilmington newspaperman, who began a new Federalist paper called the Monitor in 1800.101 Republicans, of course, reviled both McLane and the Monitor. The Monitor’s editor, Smyth, was called McLane’s . . . black-letter’d dog, Whom he retains, as Codrus does his hog, To chew his husks and take his filth away, And belch it out again for weekly pay.102

Hezekiah Niles, a Delaware Republican who later gained fame for the weekly journal of public affairs he published in Baltimore, declared that McLane was cunning and crafty, ‘‘of immense injury to us,’’ with influence, by reason of his office, greater than that of the governor.103 Another Republican declared that McLane was ‘‘the most active and bitter Enemy’’ to the Jeffersonian party in Delaware; ‘‘from the Wealth he had Acquiered by his Numerous offices and the Number of Men he now imployes in his official cappacity, he is enabled to take to the Election 50 Votes Which being always imployed against Us makes a difference of 100 Votes. . . .’’104 Other enemies sought to belittle his revolutionary record. The author of a satirical poem, The Wilmingtoniad, called McLane ‘‘wriggling Hispo’’ and offered to . . . tell the world with what consummate skill, He pilfer’d fowls and geese, from Dick and Will, With what amazing courage, sword in hand, He drove the unarm’d baker from his stand, His oven storm’d, seiz’d all his pyes and bread, And left the scent of brandy in their stead.105

Such was their enmity for Allen McLane that it is no wonder the Delaware Republicans expected, and sought, his replacement after

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Jefferson became president and the national government ceased to be Federalist. The collector held office without term, entirely at the favor of the president, and for that reason Jefferson’s approval was soon besought. Indeed, Jefferson’s favor was courted even before he became president. In view of the ardent part McLane had played in the Federalist struggle against Jefferson and the Republicans in 1800 and before, the outcome of the presidential election of that year was sad news for him. Still, the identity of the new president was not certain when the election was over. Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, were tied, and the choice between them had to be made by the House of Representatives—there being, in these pre-Twelfth Amendment days, no separate ballot for president and vice-president. Selection between Jefferson and Burr would have been a simple matter had Republicans controlled the House, but they did not. In the election they had won the new House of Representatives, but a president would be chosen by the old lame-duck House that had been elected in 1798 to serve from March 4, 1799, to March of 1801. To complicate matters, the Representatives did not vote as individuals, but as state delegations, each state being allowed one vote. For a time the Federalists sought to throw the election to Burr, but their best—or worst—efforts succeeded only in preventing Jefferson from getting the necessary majority, and thus prevented any choice. Some Federalist representatives were satisfied with this or any result that would keep Jefferson from election; others, affected either by Hamilton’s advice to prefer Jefferson to Burr or by unwillingness to negate the new Constitution, determined to withdraw their opposition and permit Jefferson’s election. Among the latter was James Bayard, whose influence was important because as Delaware’s sole representative, he cast the state vote. But before Bayard acted, he wanted some terms from Jefferson, some assurance that the public credit and the navy would be maintained, and that subordinate public officers, not involved in policy making, should not be replaced on the ground of their politics. When he approached Samuel Smith of Baltimore, a leading Republican, Bayard specified George Latimer and Allen McLane, customs collectors at Philadelphia and Wilmington respectively, as the officials he wished to protect.106 Smith, by his own testimony, took the query to Jefferson, and reported back to Bayard that Jefferson thought such officials should not be removed from office for their politics unless they had improperly forced subordinate officers to

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vote contrary to their judgment. Furthermore, Major Joseph Eggleston, a Virginian who had served in Lee’s legion, had already spoken to Jefferson on McLane’s behalf and given him such high character that he would not be displaced.107 Jefferson later denied that he ever made any bargain with Bayard during the election, and there is no need to doubt his word. Smith confessed he put Bayard’s queries to Jefferson without the latter’s being aware of his object. Then he told Bayard what Jefferson had indicated concerning his future conduct, without hinting that he was not an authorized spokesman.108 For Allen McLane, the result was all the same. Bayard and others had sought to protect him in his post, and Jefferson had decided he was a meritorious officer and should not be removed. ‘‘I have direct evidence that Mr. Jefferson will not [remove every official],’’ Bayard wrote the collector; ‘‘I have taken good care of you, and think if prudent, you are safe.’’109 In fact, McLane had already taken care of himself, for it was he who had appealed to Major Eggleston, who in turn had spoken to Jefferson.110 Once Jefferson was in office the attack on McLane was resumed, but the collector again brought influential men to his defense. He secured a recommendation from the Reverend Samuel Miller, now of New York, but son of a Presbyterian minister in Dover and member of one of the leading Republican families. Miller, who became famous for his voluminous published works, particularly a remarkable Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, was possibly encouraged to support Allen by being a brother-in-law of Allen’s brother Samuel. This must not have struck him as of much importance, for he said ‘‘I am under no personal obligation to Captn. McLane, nor do I sustain any connection with him.’’ He quickly confessed that Allen had ‘‘been a very decided and indeed warm federalist.’’ (The emphasis is Miller’s.) But yet, ‘‘in his present office, he has been, as is acknowledged on all hands, remarkably faithful, active, vigilant, and unwearied;—insomuch that the whole business of the customs, in the port over which he presides, has been on a footing, since he came into office, far more advantageous, than ever before.’’ Therefore Miller supposed it ‘‘would subserve the interests of republicanism in Delaware’’ more to keep him in office than to remove him.111 Apparently Jefferson decided to get at the truth of the charges against McLane, and so appointed persons in Delaware to inquire carefully into them. McLane made a very shrewd choice in seeking

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a lawyer to plead his case; he engaged Caesar Augustus Rodney, the leading spirit in the Delaware Republican party, an able young attorney whose career would be capped by his appointment as Jefferson’s attorney general in 1807.112 With help from Eggleston, Bayard, Miller, and Rodney, McLane’s collectorship weathered the political gale of 1801. ‘‘I was his counsel,’’ Rodney boasted; ‘‘the charges were not supported; and so he retained his office.’’113 But the Republican furies turned upon McLane again in 1802. Then the first Republican governor of Delaware, David Hall, a veteran officer of the Delaware regiment that had not accepted McLane, forwarded to Jefferson a petition from Kent County for McLane’s removal. ‘‘I know of no Character more obnoxious to the republicans of this State than Mr. McLane,’’ declared Governor Hall, ‘‘no one who has taken more undue means to crush the republican Interest. . . . A removal of this man from office . . . would . . . be very gratifying to every Republican in the State of Delaware.’’114 A Republican nominating convention and the Kent County grand jury supported Hall.115 ‘‘Oh, that monster envy!’’ exclaimed McLane, and to demonstrate his integrity he sent another long defense to Gallatin, enclosing endorsements of his military career from some of what he called ‘‘the first Military Characters.’’116 Jefferson was impressed and declared that since McLane had been acquitted of various charges in 1801, his status would not be questioned officially unless some ‘‘new act’’ were charged against him ‘‘inconsistent with his duties as an officer,’’ such as electioneering against the administration.117 In 1803 and in 1804 contention over McLane’s post broke forth again. Jobs were at the root of the controversy, McLane explained: ‘‘Here lays the whole matter. The Collector of the Revenue in this District provides for a Deputy, a temporary Surveyor at New Castle, a temporary Surveyor at Lewis Town, an Inspector at Wilmington, a weigh master, Guager, measurer, etc.’’ McLane’s enemies, on the other hand, screamed that Jefferson must be clearly told that the administration was losing elections in Delaware because all the offices, federal and state, were filled by its enemies. But the many administration supporters who hungered for McLane’s job only canceled each other out. None of them got it. McLane remained collector for another quarter of a century.118

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Notes Abbreviations AMcL DSA HSD HSP LC LMcL NYHS NYPL PMHB

Allen McLane Delaware State Archives, Dover Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Library of Congress, Washington Louis McLane (1784–1857) New-York Historical Society New York Public Library Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

1. Directory and Register for the Year 1814 of the Borough of Wilmington and Brandywine, p. 66. 2. American State Papers (Washington, 1832–1861): Class 10, Miscellaneous, 1: 272. Cf. Senate Document No. 141, 20th Cong., 1st sess., p. 40. 3. Act of March 27, 1801, in Laws of the United States of America from . . . 1789 to . . . 1815 (Philadelphia, 1815), III, 623. Cf. Senate Document No. 141, 20th Cong., 1st sess., p. 40. 4. Act of March 2, 1799, in Laws of the U.S., 3: 237–40. 5. Schmeckebier, The Customs Service, pp. 3–4, 141. 6. Ibid., pp. 9–10, 12. 7. Ibid., pp. 7–8. 8. Ibid., pp. 7, 10–13. 9. American State Papers: Misc., 1: 272. 10. H. Niles to C. A. Rodney, Feb. 7, 1804, Rodney Papers, Society Collection, HSD; P. Jaquett to C. A. Rodney, Nov. 8, 1804, Clayton Papers, LC; J. R. Black to H. M. Ridgely, April 12, 1829, Ridgely Papers, DSA; de Valinger and Shaw, Calendar of Ridgely Family Letters, 2: 240. 11. AMcL to T. Pickering, June 3, 1799, Pickering Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; AMcL to C. A. Rodney, June 24, 1801, Gratz MSS, HSP; Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans in Power, pp. 44–49. 12. T. Clayton to W. P. Brobson, Feb. 17, 1825, Brobson Papers, HSD. 13. Will Book S-I-280, Register of Wills, Wilmington. 14. AMcL to A. Jackson, Jan. 28, 1819, Jackson Papers, 1st ser., LC. 15. Wilmington Political Primer, Apr. 16, 1828. 16. AMcL to H. M. Ridgely, Jan. 23, 1815, McLane Papers; inventories, 1809– 1881, Register of Wills, Wilmington. 17. [William Maxwell,] ‘‘The Late Commodore Barron,’’ Virginia Historical Register 4 (1851): 167; W. S. Morton, ‘‘Revolutionary Officers of Virginia,’’ William and Mary College Quarterly, 2d ser., 1 (1921), 291. 18. Niles’ Register, 30 (Nov. 18, 1826): 179. 19. Levasseur, Lafayette in America, 1: 159; 2: 236. 20. Wilmington Political Primer, Apr. 16, 1828; R. M. McLane, Reminiscences, p. 158.

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21. Adams, Memoirs, 12: 204. 22. McLane family genealogical notes compiled by D. K. Este Fisher, Jr., Baltimore, with some additions from the late Reverend James Latimer McLane, Los Angeles. 23. Will of Allen McLeane, Jan. 25, 1775 (probated May 13, 1776), Register of Wills. Philadelphia. 24. McLane genealogical notes; R. M. McLane, Reminiscences, pp. 32–33. 25. McLane genealogical notes. 26. Pemberton Papers, 20: 60, HSP; W. A. Newman Dorland, ‘‘The Second Troop, Philadelphia City Cavalry,’’ PMHB 47 (1923): 274n; genealogical material by Frank Willing Leach in The North American (Philadelphia), June 21, 1908, in scrapbook at Pennsylvania Genealogical Society (kindness of John A. H. Sweeney); undated letters [Dec. 1779 and Dec. 1780] in ‘‘The Norris-Fisher Correspondence,’’ ed. John A. H. Sweeney, Delaware History 6 (March 1955): 199, 216–17; ‘‘Washington’s Household Account Book, 1793–1797,’’ PMHB 30 (1906): 43, 309, 472; 31 (1907): 186. 27. R. M. McLane, Reminiscences, p. 33. 28. McLane genealogical notes. 29. McLane family Bible, seen by courtesy of the late Reverend James Latimer McLane. 30. Extracts from AMcL’s journal, McLane Photostats, HSD. 31. McLane family Bible; Scharf, History of Delaware, 2: 1039. 32. Leon de Valinger, Jr., to the author, Apr. 1, 1957; Scharf, History of Delaware, 2: 1048. 33. McLane family Bible; McLane genealogical notes; DAB, 12, 112;. Scharf, History of Delaware, 2: 1099; petition from residents [1778], Legislative Papers, DSA; H. Lloyd Jones, Jr., ‘‘Sic Transit . . . The Story of Duck Creek Landings,’’ Delaware Foklore Bulletin 1 (Oct. 1951): 5–6. 34. Munroe, Federalist Delaware, pp. 53–54; Asbury, Journal and Letters, 1: 277–78. 35. Munroe, Federalist Delaware, pp. 167–68. 36. McLane family Bible. 37. Extract from Mrs. Freeborn Garrettson’s journal, McLane Papers; George Dangerfield, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, 1746–1813 (New York, 1960), chart opp. p. 516. 38. Extract from Mrs. Freeborn Garrettson’s journal, McLane Papers. 39. John Lednum, A History of the Rise of Methodism in America (Philadelphia, 1859), p. 260n; Henry Boehm, Reminiscences, Historical and Biographical, of Sixty-four Years in the Ministry (New York, 1865), p. 88; Scharf, History of Delaware, 2: 1102. 40. Richard Whatcoat, ‘‘Journal,’’ in W. W. Sweet, ed., Religion on the American Frontier, 1783–1840, vol. 4, The Methodists (Chicago, 1946), 86; F. Asbury to J. Dickinson, Dec. 10 [1786], in Asbury, Journal and Letters, 3: 47–48; bond of Thomas White, A. McLane, and Francis Many, June 1, 1789, Logan Papers, 36: 110, HSP. 41. Thomas Ware, Sketches of the Life and Travels of Rev. Thomas Ware (New York, 1839), pp. 185–86; Phoebus, Beams of Light on Early Methodism in America, p. 236. 42. Hanna, The Centennial Services of Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church, p. 145. 43. Asbury, Journal and Letters, 2: 129, 301, 336, 356, 440, 468. 44. Ibid., p. 754; Boehm, Reminiscences, p. 88. 45. LMcL to Dr. Allen McLane, July 23, 1806, Fisher Collection.

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46. Boehm, Reminiscences, pp. 151–52. 47. Scharf, History of Delaware, 2: 1099. 48. Copy of articles of association, Nov. 1, 1774, AMcL Letterbook, Society Collection, HSP; Irvine Papers, 16: 45, HSP. Sketches of AMcL’s career in the Emmet Collection, NYPL, the Irvine Papers, HSP, the Society Collection, HSP, the McLane Papers, NYHS, and AMcL’s journal, Morristown National Historic Park, have been largely utilized in the account of his career and will not be cited hereafter. The account in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania may be the earliest of these. See also Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 2: 321–24. 49. AMcL, commission, Sept. 11, 1775, Letterbook, Society Collection, HSP. AMcL papers cited from the Society Collection at the HSP are usually also to be found in the McLane Papers at the NYHS, of which photostatic copies are in the HSD. Copy of C. Rodney’s note, Oct. 10, 1775, Letterbook, Society Collection, HSP. 50. Ennion Williams to AMcL [Sept.] 3, 1824, Society Collection, HSP, and in ‘‘Original Letters and Documents,’’ PMHB 6 (1882): 114; Willard M. Wallace, Appeal to Arms (New York, 1951), p. 111. 51. AMcL to unknown addressee, Gratz MSS, case 4, box 21, Officers of the Revolution, HSP; Washington, Writings, 12: 82–83; J. McHenry to AMcL, June 18, 1778, Letterbook, Society Collection, HSP; A. Scammell to AMcL, Apr. 10, 1778, ibid.; Watson, Annals, 2: 322; P. Jaquett to C. A. Rodney, Nov. 8, 1804, Clayton Papers, I, LC. 52. Jean L. Brockway, ‘‘James Peale,’’ DAB, 14, 347; Sellers, Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale, p. 138; Watson, Annals, 2: 322; Ward, ‘‘The Germantown Road and Its Associations,’’ PMHB 5: (year) 17; Alexander Garden, Anecdotes of the American Revolution (Brooklyn, 1865), 3: 77. 53. S. Weir Mitchell, Hugh Wynne (1897), and Howard Fast, Conceived in Liberty (1939). 54. Unidentified newspaper clipping, Dreer Collection, HSP. 55. H. Lee to AMcL, July 2, 1779, Letterbook, Society Collection, HSP; Garden, Anecdotes, 3: 74; Wallace, Appeal to Arms, p. 198. 56. Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Naval Records of the American Revolution, 1775–1788 (Washington, 1906), p. 258; Garden, Anecdotes, 3: 75; Lewis, Admiral de Grasse and American Independence, p. 126; Gardner W. Allen, Naval History of the Revolution (Boston, 1913), 2: 565–67; AMcL to T. Clark, June 25, 1813, Society Collection, HSP. 57. Washington, Writings, 10: 283n; J. Fitzgerald to AMcL, Jan. 8, 1778, Letterbook, Society Collection, HSP; AMcL to T. Clark, June 25, 1813, ibid; unidentified newspaper clipping [c. 1848], Fisher Collection; William B. Clark, Gallant John Barry (New York, 1938), pp. 151–53. 58. AMcL, Account of the Fort Wilson Riot, Joseph Reed MSS, VI, item 90, NYHS. 59. AMcL to T. Clark, June 25, 1813, Society Collection, HSP. 60. Heitman, Historical Register of Officers of the Continental Army, p. 373; McLane Papers, NYHS; L. de Valinger, Jr., to author, March 13, 1970. 61. Heitman, Historical Register, p. 373; Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774– 1789 (Washington, 1904–1937), 12: 1212; XIV, 822–23; Washington, Writings, 8: 327n; 15: 297; 19: 486; AMcL to [C. Rodney], Apr. 20, 1779, Gratz MSS, case 4, box 21, HSP; J. Dickinson to C. Rodney, May 10, 1779, in George H. Ryden, Letters to and from Caesar Rodney (Philadelphia, 1933), p. 301; Washington to AMcL, June 9, 1779, Letterbook, Society Collection, HSP.

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62. AMcL’s anecdotes, July 2, 1826, Society Collection, HSP. 63. AMcL to J. Reed, May 20, 1780, Gratz MSS, case 4, box 21, HSP. 64. AMcL to H. Lee, Jan. 15, 1780, Washington Papers, 125, LC; H. Lee to Washington, Jan. 26, 1780, ibid.; Washington to H. Lee, Jan. 30, 1780, Washington, Writings, 17: 471. 65. Journals of the Continental Congress, 16: 159, 164; B. Stoddert to Washington, April 3, 1780, Washington Papers, 132, LC; H. Lee to Board of War, April 3, 1780, ibid.; Washington, Writings, 18: 234–35, 478–79, 486–87; J. Duane to Washington, May 21, 1780, Washingtion Papers, 136, LC; J. Shee to J. Duane [no d.], ibid.; H. Lee to Washington, Aug. 31, 1780, ibid., 148. 66. Journals of the Continental Congress, 25: 786. 67. James Tilton to James Monroe, Aug. 2, 1785, Monroe Papers, I, LC. 68. Washington, Writings, 24: 44. 69. AMcL to unknown, Dover, Jan. 13, 1790, Stauffer Collection, 7: 599, HSP. 70. Munroe, Federalist Delaware, passim. 71. ‘‘State of the General Election in Delaware Anno 1785,’’ MS in Clymer-Meredith-Read Papers, NYPL. 72. George H. Ryden, Delaware—The First State in the Union (Wilmington, 1938), pp. 24, 26. 73. Wilmington Delaware Gazette, Jan. 10, 1789; Philadelphia Pennsylvania Packet, Jan. 15, 1789. 74. Wilmington Delaware and Eastern Shore Advertiser, Sept. 3, 1794. 75. Peter Jaquett to C. A. Rodney, Nov. 8, 1804, Clayton Papers, I, LC. 76. Delaware Gazette, July 5, 1796. 77. Washington to AMcL, Sept. 30, 1789, McLane Letterbook, Society Collection, HSP. 78. American State Papers: Misc., 1: 60. 79. See summons signed by Allen McLane, J.P., Feb. 22, 1796, McLane Papers. 80. Legislative Papers, DSA; Munroe, Federalist Delaware, p. 161; Scharf History of Delaware, 2: 827; Pennsylvania Packet, Aug. 22, 1788; Delaware Abolition Society minutes, HSP. 81. Scharf, History of Delaware, 2: 1097. 82. McLane genealogical notes. 83. American State Papers: Misc., 1: 272; Conrad, History of Delaware, 1: 343. 84. LMcL to Dr. Allen McLane, Dec. 11, 19, 1806, Fisher Collection. 85. Managers’ accounts, Pennsylvania Hospital, microfilm (kindness of William H. Williams); will of Edward Worrell, dated July 4, 1829, Will Book S-I-374, Register of Wills, Wilmington; will of Allen McLane, dated Nov. 24, 1821, Will Book S-1–280, Register of Wills, Wilmington. 86. LMcL to Louis McLane, Jr., May 17, July 2, 1857, Fisher Collection; Scharf, Chronicles of Baltimore, p. 557; Baltimore Sun, Oct. 8, 9, 1857; Greenmount Cemetery records (Baltimore). 87. J. Bayard to R. Bassett, Feb. 16, 1798, in Bayard, Papers, p. 49. 88. Wilmington Political Primer, Apr. 16, 1828. 89. Scharf, History of Delaware, 2: 1099. 90. Scott, Geographical Description of . . . Maryland and Delaware, p. 183. 91. AMcL to Washington, June 9, 1794, U.S., Applications for Office under Washington, 19, LC.

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92. Act of May 8, 1792, in Laws of the U.S., 2: 298. 93. AMcL to Washington, June 9, 1794, U.S., Applications for Office under Washington, 19, LC. 94. R. Bassett to Washington, Feb. 25, 1797, ibid.; Washington, Writings, 35: 404. 95. Letters of J. Tilton quoted from William Currie, An Historical Account of the Climates and Diseases of the United States (Philadelphia, 1792), pp. 207–21; Munroe, Federalist Delaware, pp. 178–79. 96. Washington, Writings, 35: 404. 97. John Fisher to C. A. Rodney, Oct. 4, 1795, John Fisher Papers, HSD. See also Timothy Pickering to AMcL, Aug. 10, 30, 1798, Pickering Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 98. AMcL to T. Pickering, Dec. 6, 10, 1798, Pickering Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 99. Wilmington Mirror of the Times, Oct. 1, 4, 11, 1800. 100. William Cobbett, Porcupine’s Works (London, 1801), 1: 9. 101. AMcL to Nicholas Ridgely, Nov. 14, 1800, McLane Papers. 102. [Bringhurst,] The Wilmingtoniad, p. 8. 103. H. Niles to C. A. Rodney, Feb. 7, 1804, Rodney Papers, Society Collection, HSD. 104. P. Jaquett to T. Rodney, Nov. 8, 1804, Clayton Papers, vol. 1, LC. 105. [Bringhurst] The Wilmingtoniad, pp. 7–8. 106. Morton Borden, ‘‘The Election of 1800: Charge and Countercharge,’’ Delaware History 5 (March 1952), 58. 107. Ibid., p. 59; Matthew L. Davis, Memoirs of Aaron Burr (New York, 1836–1837), 2: 132, 135–36. 108. Borden, ‘‘Election of 1800,’’ p. 60; Davis, Memoirs of Burr, 2: 136. 109. J. Bayard to AMcL, Feb. 17, 1801, in Bayard, Papers, p. 127. 110. AMcL to Joseph Eggleston, Jan. 1, 1801, Jefferson Papers, 153, LC. 111. Samuel Miller to A. Gallatin, June 22, 1801, Gallatin Papers, NYHS. Cf. Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans in Power, pp. 44–49. 112. AMcL to C. A. Rodney, June 24, 1801, Gratz MSS, case 4, box 21, HSP; undated letter of C. A. Rodney in Wilmington Mirror of the Times, June 29, 1803. 113. Undated letter of C. A. Rodney in Wilmington Mirror of the Times, June 29, 1803. 114. David Hall to T. Jefferson, May 31, 1802, Jefferson Papers, 123, LC. 115. Address of Democratic Republican Convention to T. Jefferson [June 5, 1802]; Jno. Bird to Jefferson, June 8, 1802; David Hall to Jefferson, June 9, 1802; unknown to unknown, Kent County, June 8, 1802, ibid. 116. AMcL to John Steele, June 12, 1802; AMcL to A. Gallatin, June 12, 1802, ibid. 117. T. Jefferson to David Hall, July 6, 1802, in Jefferson, Works (ed. Paul Leicester Ford) (New York, 1892–1899), 8: 157n; Jefferson to C. A. Rodney, June 14, 1802, ibid., pp. 154–55. 118. AMcL to A. Gallatin, Jan. 11, 1803, Jefferson Papers, 128, LC; AMcL to John Steele, Oct. 25, 1802, ibid., 127; AMcL to Gallatin, Nov. 3, 1802, Gallatin Papers, NYHS; H. Niles to C. A. Rodney, Feb. 7, 1804, Rodney Papers, Society Collection, HSD; extract from Wilmington Mirror of the Times [Aug. 27, 1804], Jefferson Papers, 163, LC; Peter Jaquett to C. A. Rodney, Nov. 8, 1804, Clayton Papers, 1, LC; John Bird to C. A. Rodney, Nov. 5, 1804 (photostat), Morse Autograph Collection, 1, HSD.

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12 Reflections on Delaware and the American Revolution To celebrate the bicentennial of the American Revolution, the editorial board of Delaware History, the journal of the Historical Society of Delaware, wished to honor the event by special attention and called on me as editor since 1969, when I had succeeded Charles Lee Reese, Jr., editor since its founding in 1946, to write a commemorative article. Over the years I had written and spoken many times about events in Delaware during the Revolution, from my M.A. thesis in 1941 on the relations between the Continental Congress and the Delaware legislature and my Ph.D. dissertation in 1947 on Delaware in the revolutionary era. Rather than once again trace events of these exciting times I decided to note a few matters that I thought merited more attention than they generally received. These ‘‘Reflections’’ appeared on pages of Delaware History, vol. 17 (1976–77) pp. 1–11.

AT A TIME WHEN DELAWAREANS, LIKE AMERICANS GENERALLY, ARE RECONsidering their history in the Revolutionary period, there are five neglected aspects of this portion of Delaware history that deserve attention. These are (1) the privileged status of Delaware within the old British empire, (2) the timely settlement of the Maryland boundary controversy, (3) the triumph of moderate leadership in Delaware, (4) the Methodist revival, and (5) the unanimity of acceptance of the Federal Constitution.

The Privileged Status of Delaware Within the Old British Empire Within the old British empire Delaware was unusually free from British interference because it had no resident governor or council 219

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and was not required to send its laws to Britain for review and possible rejection. Delaware was not quite so independent as Connecticut or Rhode Island, which elected their own governors, for Delaware did have an appointed governor and he held very real powers, especially the power to veto bills passed by the General Assembly and the power to appoint many local officials. But he was also the governor of Pennsylvania, he lived in Philadelphia, and his attention was generally absorbed by the grand prospects of this northern province as well as by an almost continuous struggle for power with its assemblymen. The Pennsylvania assembly, dominated or at least influenced by a Quaker faction, was reluctant to support Britain’s foreign wars and Indian conflicts but eager to tax the private domains of the Penn proprietors, whose appointee the governor was. In Delaware there were few Quakers and little moral or religious opposition to the military establishment; on the contrary, Delaware assemblymen looked to the governor, and through him to the empire, for defense against raids by pirates or by foreign sailors—such as the group of about twenty Frenchmen or Spaniards who looted the Liston and Hart plantations at the head of Delaware Bay in July 1747. Nor were there extensive private holdings of the Penn family in Delaware to excite the envy of residents and become a bone of contention between the governor and the assembly. The Penns did claim title to all land not granted to private individuals, but by the 1770s Delaware had been settled so long that such lands as remained ungranted within its narrow bounds were considered to be of little value. For these reasons, his relations with the Delaware assembly furnished the governor with what must have seemed a relatively pleasant respite from the incessant bickering that marked his relations with the Pennsylvania assembly. Once or twice a year the governor would travel thirty-five miles from Philadelphia to New Castle by road or by river and take rooms at an inn for the two weeks or so of the assembly’s session. Though he possessed an absolute veto over legislation, such objections as he voiced more often led to amendment and compromise than to an impasse. The possibility of a veto encouraged the assembly to be cooperative, while the governor in his turn was eager for a harmonious session so that he could quickly return to Philadelphia and more comfortable living conditions than in rented rooms at a New Castle inn—and he was also moved to be

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agreeable by knowledge that the assembly could be expected to vote him a gift of money at the end of the session. Once the governor had approved, or ‘‘passed,’’ a bill, it became law without further review. Delaware laws were not sent to England; therefore they did not come before the Board of Trade or the Privy Council or any other agency of government there. This was a case of ‘‘salutary neglect’’ of a small colony whose legal status was uncertain and whose very existence could be and was easily forgotten—a colony without a proper name except for the cumbersome title of Government of the Counties of New Castle, Kent, and Sussex on Delaware. The existence of this colony was temporarily recalled in London whenever a new governor was being approved, for then the status of the colony was—nominally, at least—questioned. The right of the proprietors, those descendants of William Penn who inherited his American claims, to appoint a governor of Pennsylvania (deputy or lieutenant governor was the correct title) was not in doubt. But in approving the same man as governor of Delaware the Crown insisted the proprietors sign a statement that this appointment did not in any way ‘‘diminish or set aside the Right claimed by the Crown’’ to the Delaware counties. Because their claim to Delaware rested on shaky grounds, the Penns were not eager to call Delaware affairs to anyone’s attention; they valued the Delaware counties highly for their strategic location between Pennsylvania and the sea, and they appreciated the generally harmonious relationship that had developed between their governor and the Delaware assembly. To say that this relationship was generally harmonious does not mean that there were no disagreements. On occasion, the governor did deny the assembly its wishes. Among the few bills quashed by a gubernatorial veto on the eve of the Revolution were two of special interest: a bill to forbid the importation of slaves and a bill establishing an elected levy court (as in Pennsylvania) to set the tax rate in each county. These bills, however, were exceptions to the normally smooth cooperation between the assembly and the governor, who not only looked upon most bills with favor but also was receptive to suggestions of individual assemblymen when appointments were to be made. With very few resident representatives of extracolonial authority (the customs collectors at New Castle and Lewes were exceptions) and left largely to their own devices, the Delaware counties had a fortunate situation in the old empire.

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The Timely Settlement of the Maryland Boundary Controversy By sheer good fortune the year 1775 marked the conclusion of a boundary quarrel with Maryland that had lasted, off and on, for a century. The details of the quarrel are too long and complicated for complete exposition here, but a few major points may be noted. In 1685, the English Privy Council limited the claim of Maryland to the western half of the Delmarva Peninsula (as it is called today) north of Cape Henlopen. In 1732, the heirs of William Penn and the current Lord Baltimore agreed to have a boundary drawn according to the terms of this decision, identifying Cape Hen1open as at Fenwick Island, where indeed Dutch Captain Cornelis May had originally planted the name, though it had drifted up the coast to the mouth of Delaware Bay. Unfortunately for the Penns, Charles Calvert, the fifth Lord Baltimore, soon regretted the agreement he made in 1732, and they were forced to sue him in Chancery Court. Lord Baltimore was attempting to upset the decision of 1685, arguing that most if not all of Delaware fell within the grant made to the original Maryland proprietor in 1632. When a decision was finally rendered in the Court of Chancery, it upheld the claims of the Penns and the limitations imposed on Lord Baltimore’s claims by the decision of 1685 and the agreement of 1732. At last, the marking of the Delaware boundaries began. In 1750– 1751 American surveyors marked the transpeninsular line at the southern edge of Delaware from Fenwick Island westward halfway to Chesapeake Bay. Drawing the next boundary line, however, presented special problems, for from the middle point across the peninsula a straight line was to be drawn northward (but not directly north) so as to make a tangent with a circle of twelve miles radius based at New Castle. To accomplish the difficult task of surveying a tangent line through the uncharted forests that lay along much of the western Delaware border, Lord Baltimore and the Penns engaged two experienced Englishmen, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who were recommended by the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich. Mason and Dixon came to America in 1763 and spent almost five years in surveying and marking the western boundary of Delaware and most of the Pennsylvania-Maryland boundary, which was also in

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dispute. The last markers were placed on the boundary in 1768 and Crown approval was given in January 1769, but several years more elapsed before the new boundaries were officially accepted by the colonial governments. Acceptance of the new boundaries meant a considerable accretion of territory to Delaware on the western border of Kent and on the western and southern borders of Sussex. Many people who thought themselves born and reared in Maryland suddenly discovered their lands were in Delaware. Two chapels of ease that were parts of Maryland parishes, Christ Church at Broad Creek and Prince George’s at Dagsboro, were discovered to be on the Delaware side of the border, separated from their mother churches. So distant were the new parts of Sussex from Lewes, the county seat, that a petition was prepared for a new Delaware county and brought to the New Castle assembly in August 1775, by John Dagworthy and three other residents of what was called New Sussex. The assembly, however, rejected the petition, ordering the county lines extended so as to comprehend all the new territory. In time, however, the complaints of the residents of New Sussex played a part in determining the assembly to remove the county courts from Lewes to a more central location, which is said to have been named Georgetown for George Mitchell, one of the former Marylanders. At the height of the boundary quarrel, the relations of Delawareans and Marylanders had been inflamed to a point barely short of war. Armed Marylanders had invaded New Castle town in 1659, when it was still Dutch. Twice Maryland troops occupied Lewes, burning every house in town on one occasion. George Talbot, cousin of a Lord Baltimore, erected a small log fort between Christiana and Ogletown in 1683 or 1684 and kept it garrisoned for several years in order to frighten people from settling west of Christiana under grants from William Penn. For years thereafter surviving records tell of other altercations on the boundary and of men being carried off to jail in Dover or in Maryland towns because they refused to pay taxes to one jurisdiction or the other. Governor John Penn’s announcement of the final acceptance of the new boundaries in 1775 meant not only an end to resentments and controversies that had embittered Delaware-Maryland relations and might have made cooperation of the two colonies in the Revolutionary War difficult; it also removed the chief reason Delawareans had for preserving their tie with the Penns. It was the proprietors, after all, who paid the bills of those who argued the case in English

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courts or drew the boundary through peninsular forests and swamps. As long as the boundary controversy raged, thoughtful Delawareans valued their proprietary connection. When it was settled, that connection lost a large part of its attraction to residents of the Delaware counties.

The Triumph of Moderate Leadership in Delaware Through the years of the Revolution there were two elements in Delaware that often expressed dissatisfaction with the action—and sometimes with the inaction—of political authorities in this state, particularly with the members of the General Assembly. Loyalists, like Thomas Robinson and Simon Kollock, were distressed that colonial protests against British policies were carried so far as to lead to a war for independence. Ardent revolutionaries, like John Haslet or James Tilton, on the other hand, thought the Delaware government was too slow, that it dragged its heels instead of moving forthrightly on a course directed toward complete freedom from ties to Britain. Buffeted thus from two sides, the General Assembly still followed a course that allowed it to remain in command of the situation. In many states the colonial assembly was overthrown by those who wanted more precipitate action. Sometimes they replaced it by an extralegal provincial conference or congress that temporarily took command. In Delaware, however, the assembly remained in unchallenged authority. Its success lay in its determination to acquire and retain for Delaware an equal voice in all continental councils. Having maintained a separate identity from Pennsylvania for almost three quarters of a century and having finally secured a boundary settlement that ended the pretensions of Maryland, the Delaware counties were determined to maintain their status despite the upheavals of the Revolutionary era. Whether a colony or a state, Delaware was too small to fall out of step with its neighbors, even though many of its people might see little reason for drastic action. When, for example, in May 1776, Congress called on the states to make such alterations in their governments as necessary to meet the exigencies of the times, there are reported to have been more Delawareans signing petitions to retain their government as it was than there were petitioning for a new government. Nevertheless, the assembly cut its ties to England on June 15 and withdrew instructions

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to its congressmen to seek reconciliation, thus leaving them free to vote for independence if they chose to, as two of the three congressmen did. Immediately thereafter the assembly called elections for a constitutional convention, which met in August 1776, and wrote the first constitution produced in any state by a body specifically and solely elected for this purpose. Caesar Rodney was left out of this convention, which was dominated by moderates or conservatives who were reported to ‘‘have done as little as possible, & modelled their new government as like the old as may be.’’ The most important change they made was to reduce the role of the chief executive from that of the proprietary governor to the position of a mere presiding officer, a president (as they called him) lacking veto power, holding only severely limited powers of appointment, and required to secure approval from a privy council of four men, chosen by the assembly, for most of the few actions he was permitted to take. On the other hand, the General Assembly, which now became a bicameral body, was the center of all power, electing the executive and the congressmen, dominating all other appointments, and passing bills into law without the possibility of an executive veto. In the first assembly elections held under the new constitution, the moderate conservatives were victorious. When it came time to elect delegates to Congress, the new assembly dropped from the delegation the two vigorous revolutionaries, McKean and Rodney, who had voted for independence, while it reelected George Read, the one member of the delegation who had voted against independence in July 1776, though he later signed the Declaration. And with Read as a new member of the Delaware delegation the assembly elected his friend, John Dickinson, who while representing Pennsylvania had made the principal speech against independence on July 1 and had later refused even to sign the Declaration. In many ways, George Read is a more typical Delaware leader of the Revolutionary period than either of his more spirited contemporaries, McKean or Rodney (or than John Dickinson, who cared much more about Pennsylvania politics than those of Delaware). He would move with the times; he saw the necessity to keep Delaware in step with neighboring states; but slowly, slowly, was his watchword. In Congress he signed the Declaration though he voted against independence. At home he sought to preserve political continuity in the midst of change, to retain for the state government the loyalty

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of as many people as possible, even those who regretted the revolutionary course it was taking. Becoming speaker of the upper house in the first bicameral assembly, he is said to have procured the election of John McKinly as first president. In many ways McKinly seemed a wise choice: he was chief burgess of Wilmington, Delaware’s largest town; he was a veteran militia officer from the French and Indian War and the ranking officer in New Castle County; he had served with Rodney, McKean, and Read—and Thomas Robinson—on Delaware’s recent committee of correspondence, which coordinated Delaware’s activities with those of other colonies in the initial stages of the Revolution; he was speaker of the lower house of the assembly and also president of the Council of Safety, which prepared Delaware’s defenses when the assembly was not sitting; he was at once a moderate (suspected by some radical revolutionaries of being a Loyalist or at least lukewarm) and yet an Irish-born Presbyterian and therefore a member of that group of Delawareans most ardent in support of the Revolution. To radical rebels like James Tilton, who later attacked Read, calling him ‘‘Dionysius, Tyrant of Delaware,’’ in an anonymous publication, the choice of McKinly seemed a betrayal of revolutionary goals. In early 1777, however, when conservatives were adjusting slowly to the shock of independence and establishment of a new government, the selection of McKinly may have been a wise precaution to retain the loyalty of both extreme factions, the radicals, who knew him to be a Presbyterian and a militia officer, and the conservatives, who realized he was no firebrand. The invasion of Delaware by the British in September 1777, disrupted the work of the moderates. McKinly was captured when Wilmington was occupied; the state treasury and many state records were seized; and once the British fleet moved up the Delaware most of the state was on the firing line. In the moment of peril there was no longer time for temporizing, moderate measures that would attempt to appeal to all men. Read and his faction joined with the radicals to defend the state, choosing Caesar Rodney, an ardent revolutionary, to succeed McKinly as president. Before a year had passed, the crisis was over; in June of 1778 the British evacuated Philadelphia and removed their fleet from the Delaware except for a patrol off Cape Henlopen. Gradually the Delaware State (as its official name was from 1776 to 1792) regained its equilibrium and by 1782 the moderate faction had resumed control. The crisis had led some loyalists to show their colors and flee to the

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enemy; in 1778 a confiscation act was passed seizing the property of such dissidents, and so was a test act which sought to identify the disloyal by requiring men to swear their allegiance to the American government. Occasional acts of violence occurred in this crisis and at other times in the Revolution. Elections were sometimes disturbed, threats were uttered, sheriff ’s posses and militia companies were called out on occasion. Yet in the heart of the Revolution, a loyal Englishman, the missionary Francis Asbury, otherwise a perpetual itinerant through all of English America, chose Kent County in Delaware as a place of refuge from test oaths and sedition laws that might have led to his jailing in other states. He avoided taking any oath to come to the defense of revolutionary governments but declared that if necessary he could in good conscience have subscribed to the mild oath of this free state. When Rodney’s term as president ended, he was succeeded by John Dickinson, chosen by unanimous vote of all assemblymen except one, himself. Yet his reemergence in Delaware politics was largely due to his old fellow law student, George Read, not to his own efforts. Even his election to the assembly seems to have been Read’s work, for Dickinson was elected not from Kent County, where he was living at the time and where he had been reared, but from New Castle County, where Read’s influence was greatest. The near-unanimity of his choice as president indicates the popularity of moderate measures and moderate men in Delaware in 1782. Despite desertion of the state by loyalists such as Robinson and Attorney General Jacob Moore, despite occasional gatherings and rumors of more gatherings by illegal bands of armed men, despite the dissatisfaction of those who thought the government too tepid, despite grumbling and occasional small outbreaks of violence Delaware came through the war without a serious internal revolution. Though Delaware was seriously divided on the issue of independence, the assembly retained control of events and moved their state along on the pathway taken by its neighbors through the war and after. In the long run Delaware yielded to no state in its enthusiastic support of the postwar policies of General Washington and his nationalist colleagues, while yet it allowed Thomas Robinson to return from his exile and saw his son three times appointed secretary of state before becoming a judge of the superior court. The temperate, moderate course of Delaware leadership in the American Revolution correctly represented the feelings of the peo-

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ple of Delaware, who wished to keep in step with sister states on terms of equality, who, as Americans, resented many actions of the British, but whose ardor for war and bloodshed was restrained by the knowledge that their life had been good in the old empire, which had given them few if any peculiar reasons for dissatisfaction with their status. The leadership of Read in this period has been insufficiently appreciated. Recognition did come, however, in his own lifetime with his election to the first Senate of the United States, which he left only when Governor Joshua Clayton offered him his choice of any judicial post in Delaware under the state constitution of 1792. And after he died (in 1798), his old friend John Dickinson, now associated with the Jeffersonian (and Madisonian) Republicans, gave the widow a valuable farm near Christiana ’’as some testimony, though an imperfect one, of high esteem for thyself and of affectionate reverence for the memory of our beloved friend.‘‘

The Methodist Revival Aside from politics, the most remarkable change taking place in Delaware during the period of the American Revolution was the revival of religion under the auspices of Wesleyan or Methodist preachers. Although there was no established church in Delaware, more Delawareans were identified with the Church of England before the Revolution than with any other church. This comment applies to blacks as well as whites, because the Anglicans had shown more interest in ministering to the slaves in these counties than had their chief rivals, the Presbyterians, or, for that matter, such smaller groups as the Lutherans and Quakers. Yet for a variety of reasons most of the Anglican population was unchurched: that is, they seldom if ever got to church and had little knowledge of their religion. Although usually baptized, they were never confirmed unless they were immigrants or had travelled abroad because there was no Anglican bishop in this area to administer confirmation. The lack of a bishop also meant that no Americans could enter the priesthood unless they went abroad for ordination. The consequence of this latter situation, compounded by lack of governmental support of religion and by a sparse population living on scattered farms and prevented by poor roads from easily getting to the few places where church services were held, was

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that the Church of England simply could not provide for its potential membership in the Delaware counties. There were never more than five Anglican clergymen at one time in colonial Delaware (at New Castle, Middletown, Dover, Milford, and Lewes), and their reach, in geographic terms, was small. The American Revolution weakened the denomination very severely as some ministers left or closed their churches (rather than alter services that included prayers for the king) and no new ministers were available. The Methodists, however, filled the gap and soon reached far more Delawareans than the Anglicans ever had. The first Methodist society in Delaware, or in America, was organized at Lewes in 1739 by George Whitefield, an associate of John and Charles Wesley, founders of this evangelical reform movement within the English church. A powerful preacher, Whitefield attracted huge crowds in his several tours through America but his primary effect was upon the Presbyterians and neither at Lewes nor elsewhere did a permanent Methodist society result from his American tours. The first effective and lasting Methodist organization in Delaware was probably due to the efforts of Captain Thomas Webb, a retired soldier turned preacher who frequently visited Delaware in 1769 and thereafter and is credited with organizing the congregation that became Asbury Church in Wilmington. Robert Strawbridge, an Irish Methodist who had emigrated to Maryland, may also have been working in Delaware at this time. Most important, however, was Francis Asbury, who was sent to America by John Wesley in 1771 and remained to his death in 1816, almost constantly traveling except for the twenty months he spent in Kent County, Delaware, during 1777–1778, the critical years of the Revolution. Asbury and the other Methodists did not originally intend to set up a separate church but only to revivify and extend the work of the Church of England, of which they were members. They came to Delaware, then, not as enemies of the Church but as friends, who, not being ordained priests or attached to any church or parish, could go where the people were, preach whenever an audience was found, and raise up zealous followers to become preachers themselves, for the original Methodist missionaries to America, while not spurning education, were usually men of limited schooling and would require zeal and sacrifice rather than formal education of Americans who joined their ranks. So successful were these English preachers that although all ex-

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Barratt’s Chapel, built in 1780 near Frederica. Here Coke and Asbury planned organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Sketch by Alfred T. Scott, from Andrew Manship, Thirteen Years’ Experience In the Itinerancy (Philadelphia, 1856). Courtesy of Barratt’s Chapel & Museum.

cept Asbury returned to the mother country during the Revolution, they had by then recruited sufficient native American preachers to take up their work. On the Delmarva Peninsula, where they came from the same English, Anglican background as most of the farmers, they found an audience hungry for their words and their success was sensational. The original Methodists were usually abolitionists and made a point of preaching to blacks—and encouraging black men to become preachers—as well as whites. By 1784, when the Methodists established a separate church they were well on the way to becoming, if they had not already become, the largest denomination in Delaware. The Methodist preachers had filled a void in the lives of the people, especially those in rural areas, away from the few Delaware towns and their existing churches. As Asbury said, he found his ‘‘spirit at liberty in preaching to those untaught people, who behaved with seriousness and attention.’’ The early Methodist preachers tended not only to be abolitionists but also pacifists. (Captain Webb had retired before he was converted.) To them the American Revolution was a secondary matter

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to their task of saving souls. The success of Methodism in Delaware strengthened the politics of moderation because the disciples of Asbury were more interested in freeing themselves from sin than in freeing their land from the British.

The Unanimity of Acceptance of the Federal Constitution Delawareans have always been very proud that theirs was the first state to ratify the Federal Constitution. Their claim to this distinction of priority is fair and indisputable. But it may be of more historical significance that the Delaware ratifying convention acted unanimously than that it was the first convention to accept the new constitution. The Federal Constitution was written in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. When completed in September, it was sent to the Continental Congress in New York which in its turn sent copies to the states. Meanwhile the delegates to the Philadelphia convention had returned to their homes and had begun individually (except for the few displeased members, none of whom came from Delaware) to encourage the convocation of state ratifying conventions. Since the constitution was written in Philadelphia, it is not strange that Pennsylvania was the first state, Delaware the second, and New Jersey the third in which conventions met. While the Pennsylvania convention debated the constitution before adopting it by a split vote on December 12, the Delaware convention had met and unanimously voted to ratify the constitution—the date of ratification, December 7, now being celebrated as Delaware Day. Probably there was some opposition to the new constitution in Delaware; it is inconceivable that in a free society any new measure could be accepted with no dissent. However, no leader of any consequence was opposed to the constitution as far as is known, nor any political faction, nor any group, organized or unorganized. One measure of the popularity of the new constitution is afforded by an election dispute that occurred in Sussex County that fall. The defeated candidates entered their protest at the convention but expressed no desire to disrupt or delay its meeting because it made no difference which candidates were elected to the ratifying convention: ‘‘all were agreed in ratifying the federal constitution; and it could be an object with nobody to set the election aside.’’

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The new constitution was popular in Delaware, just as in New Jersey, which also approved it unanimously, without organized opposition, and speedily (being the third state to ratify), because it offered small, weak states with no great prospects of their own, without major ports for foreign trade, equal status and continued identity in the safety of a strong, national union where their citizens could enjoy the same prospects as the citizens of great, strong states like Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. For Delawareans the safety of the new union replaced the safety of the old empire. It is well known that the Delaware delegation went to the constitutional convention in Philadelphia with their hands tied by instructions from the legislature they represented that they must insist on an equal voice for Delaware in any new government the convention would devise. It is also known that the effective leader of the delegation, George Read, had written these instructions, as chairman of the appropriate legislative committee. When the great compromise was reached, by which Delaware received an equal vote in the Senate at the cost of accepting proportional representation in the lower house, the Delaware delegates never hesitated, although this was not strictly in accord with their instructions. They knew this was the best arrangement they could secure, and they believed it was satisfactory. On this basis, they supported establishment of a strong government, confident it would be acceptable to their assembly and their people. It was a triumph of the moderate leadership, a triumph for George Read and his colleagues in the convention delegation: John Dickinson, Read’s old friend once again coaxed out of political retirement; Richard Bassett, a wealthy convert to Methodism, who, like Dickinson, had freed all of his many slaves; Gunning Bedford, Jr., Delaware attorney-general; Jacob Broom, a young merchant-manufacturer. They were enthusiastic about the new government, and once again they read their people correctly. The Federal Constitution was a document to which all Delawareans could rally. It was the culmination of a long effort by Delaware leaders to keep in step with their sister states, preserving their identity and their hope of achieving a political order in independence that would guarantee them the safety, the liberties, and the high degree of self-government to which they had been accustomed before the Revolution began.

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13 Church versus State: The Early Struggle for Control of Delaware College In 1982 I was asked to deliver the fourth annual Distinguished Faculty Lecture in the College of Arts and Science. Dean Helen Gouldner had established this lectureship and provided that the choice should be made each year by an advisory group of six scholars, representing various fields in the arts and science college. By the terms of the appointment I was called on to deliver a lecture based on my research. I was then engaged in writing a history of the University of Delaware and sought to find in my work a topic that might appeal to faculty from various fields who might attend the lecture. The college owed its foundation to Francis Alison, a Presbyterian minister, and in its early years the school received special favor from its Presbyterian connections. In time, however, it was public support that permitted the college to overcome serious problems, mainly financial. The lecture was published as a booklet by the University of Delaware in 1983.

IN ITS REMOTEST ORIGINS THIS UNIVERSITY BEGAN AS A CHURCH SCHOOL, an academy conducted by Presbyterians, though open to all creeds. The founder was Francis Alison, an Irish immigrant, who opened the school in 1743 on his farm near New London, Pennsylvania, where he was the pastor. Various Presbyterian bodies had encouraged the step he took, and before the school was a year old it was officially adopted by the governing body of Presbyterians in this area, the Synod of Philadelphia. The synod asked each congregation to take up a collection for this school and it appointed a supervisory committee that functioned like a board of trustees. The academy at New London flourished, but in January 1752 the 233

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founder, Francis Alison, left New London for a new school that soon became a college in Philadelphia. The Presbyterian synod transferred responsibility for the academy at New London to another Irish immigrant minister, Alexander McDowell, who moved the school to his home near Lewisville, Pennsylvania. Some time between 1759 and 1765 McDowell moved the academy again, this time to the village of Newark. The synod had stopped contributing to the support of this school in 1755—probably because many other private academies had come into existence. But this academy still had strong friends among Presbyterian leaders— notably Francis Alison himself—and they determined, for various reasons, to make this academy into a college. Alison was now viceprovost of the College of Philadelphia, which was officially nondenominational, but he was firmly of the opinion that Presbyterians needed a college of their own to educate young men who might aspire to become ministers. He was not thinking of a school of divinity—that was then a subject for private postgraduate study—but of a college with a classical curriculum preparing men to enter any of the learned professions. He had also concluded that the Presbyterian church, then largely a church of immigrants, must recruit its ministers from poor boys, reared on farms, who could not afford the expense of going to college in a city and should not be subjected to the temptations to vice and extravagant living that abounded in cities such as Philadelphia. He disliked and distrusted the leadership of the one existing Presbyterian college in this area, the College of New Jersey, at Princeton, which he held was dominated by men who were enthusiasts, not properly respectful of true learning. Alison and his friends asked the proprietary government to incorporate—that is, to charter—a college at Newark, but Thomas Penn, the principal proprietor of both Pennsylvania and Delaware, felt that the one existing college at Philadelphia should be enough for his colonists. He did condescend, in 1769, to charter an Academy of Newark, however. Not all of the trustees Penn named to the self-perpetuating board of the academy were Presbyterians, but the majority were, and choosing Alison as their president, they set out to convert the Academy of Newark into a college in practice if not in name. Other Presbyterian ministers were hired to help McDowell on the faculty, and students were recruited through church connections over a wide area—from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina,

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as well as Delaware. Agents, usually ministers, were sent out to raise funds for the academy. One agent went to Charleston, South Carolina; another traveled across Jamaica from Kingston to Montego Bay, begging wealthy Presbyterian planters to help the academy. At the end of 1773 two agents left for England to solicit funds there and in Scotland and Ireland. Unfortunately, their mission coincided with the opening of the American Revolution, which drastically reduced the interest of the British in helping an American school. Still, they did collect some money, including a gift from George III, which helped form a modest endowment. Meanwhile, for at least three years, from 1772 to 1775, the Academy of Newark operated a ‘‘philosophical school’’ that was apparently the equivalent of a college in all ways except the ability to grant degrees. Alexander McDowell described the scene in blank verse: Here in a rural, quiet, sweet retreat With Health and Innocence the Muses dwell, The wild disturbing noise of bustling crowds And guilty scenes of vice, and dangerous foes To unexperienc’d youth are far from hence . . . , [far from] this pleasing Seat Where Science early formed our youthful minds.

Then the war came, and with the war an invasion by British troops. The academy closed in 1777 and remained closed for three years. The invaders carried off the records of the academy and probably any part of the endowment that was not invested in mortgages or bonds. Francis Alison died in 1779, before the school reopened. The school did reopen in 1780 but it was far less pretentious than before, only a shadow of its former self. It was now an academy, nothing more, a Latin grammar school run by a succession of Presbyterian ministers, paid from tuition fees abetted by some money from endowment income, which also served to repair the stone academy building, built in the 1760s but now only half used. The dream of a college did not die, but now, with Francis Alison dead, friends of the academy turned to the State of Delaware, not to the Presbyterian church, for support For four years running, in 1780, 1781, 1782, and 1783, the Delaware General Assembly received petitions to turn the academy ‘‘into,’’ in their words, ‘‘a College upon a broad and catholick Bottom,’’ by which was meant equal privileges for all denominations of Christians. The petitioners

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suggested that state officials be appointed to the board to be sure the school served the public and, of course, they hoped for some financial support from the state. But the General Assembly was not ready yet to support schools at any level and for twenty-five years it did nothing for the Newark Academy. Then, in 1818, the Assembly took its first positive steps toward creating a college; it gave the Newark Academy trustees permission to run a lottery and raise up to $50,000 for a college. This presented the trustees with a moral dilemma. Some of them—the Presbyterian ministers especially—disapproved of lotteries. Their opposition kept the board from taking any action to put the lottery into effect. Then, in 1821, friends of the Newark Academy in the legislature (especially Andrew Gray, Henry Whitely, and Samuel H. Black) tried a different tack. They actually incorporated a college, called Delaware College (this is in 1821, twelve years before the date on our seal), but named no trustees to organize it. Organization was to wait on the accumulation of funds, which were to derive from two new taxes that they levied. The first new tax was on transportation by stagecoach or steamboat. Twenty-five cents was to be collected for Delaware College from every adult steamboat passenger; stagecoach lines were to pay the college eight percent of their annual receipts. The second tax was on merchants who sold foreign goods: to protect domestic farmers and manufacturers, every merchant who sold imported goods (except in bulk) had to pay a license fee, and half of this fee was to go to Delaware College. All of a sudden the state, after years of reluctance, had created a college (in name at least) and provided for its financial support. But it was too good to last. There was a furious reaction against the taxes, joined in by everyone hit by them—such as merchants, innkeepers, hostlers, and sailors. Why should a state that had no public schools support a college? Was it not to be a college for the sons of rich men, since only rich men could afford to prepare their sons to enter college? The opposition centered in New Castle County, especially in Wilmington and New Castle, where most of the affected merchants lived. At the next election every New Castle County legislator who had supported the tax and dared run for reelection was defeated. The new legislature quickly cut Delaware College out of the tax laws; over $2,000 had accrued to the college fund, but there would be no more. Friends of the college then turned back to the unused lottery of

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1818. They changed the law so that not the whole board of trustees of the Newark Academy would be managers of the lottery, but just certain selected trustees who were known to be in favor of it. This new group of managers put the lottery into effect in 1825, aiming to raise $50,000 over ten years. Money flowed in, and in 1833 the legislature named a board of trustees for the new college, which it now called Newark College, since it was an outgrowth of the Newark Academy. (Apparently the legislators forgot that they had incorporated the institution under another name, though without trustees to organize it, twelve years earlier.) The charter of Newark College said there should be no religious test for students, faculty, or trustees, and it named thirty-three trustees, some from each county in the state, from each political party, and from several denominations. But included among the trustees were all the members of the board of the Newark Academy, which was now joined to the college as its preparatory school. Since the academy trustees were mostly Presbyterian, including four ministers, and since they were most interested and most faithful in attending meetings, this Presbyterian group was very influential in the affairs of the college. Many of the new trustees showed little interest. As a matter of fact, this was the heyday of Presbyterian influence in American higher education. Most college presidents were ministers (fifty-one out of fifty-four presidents of the leading colleges in 1839), and most of these ministers were either Presbyterians or their New England allies, the Congregationalists (forty out of the fifty-one just noted). So it is not strange that when Newark College opened in May 1834 its first two professors were ministers, one a Congregationalist who had graduated from Harvard and the other a Presbyterian graduate of Dickinson. For one term the college operated without a president, but with one of the professors serving as principal. When this scheme did not work out to the trustees’ satisfaction, they elected one of their members, the president of the board, to be president of the college. This first college president was, not surprisingly, a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Eliphalet Wheeler Gilbert. For a good many years, Gilbert had been pastor of the largest Presbyterian Church in Delaware—Second Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, which had recently changed its name to Hanover Street Presbyterian Church. Gilbert was free to take over direction of the college because he had given up his church to become an agent for the American Educa-

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tion Society, an organization that raised and dispensed money to help support young men in college who intended to enter the Presbyterian or Congregational ministry. This position had made Gilbert acquainted with many colleges and helped him become a good college president. But before he was in Newark one year, he discovered scruples that made it impossible for him to continue as college president. He objected, on moral and religious grounds, to taking money from a lottery. The college building (now called Old College) had been constructed with the proceeds of the lottery the state had established to aid the college. Once it was paid for, the income from the lottery, which was still going on, helped with equipment and furnishing and went into an endowment fund that was used for current expenses. In the year after Gilbert became president of the college, the legislature authorized a second $50,000 lottery for the college, to be conducted over the next ten years. When the trustees refused to give up this source of income— almost the only income they had—Gilbert resigned, and with him most of the faculty and some sympathetic trustees. The remaining trustees, including some Presbyterians who did not agree with Gilbert, hired a new president, an Episcopal minister, the Reverend Richard Mason, who did not object to lotteries. Mason gathered a good staff, with Episcopalians slightly dominating, but he sought to be nondenominational. In a few years, however, he was discouraged. A fine man, he was not a strong disciplinarian. Mischievous students vandalized the college building; the columns on the portico of Old College Hall were so disfigured by students that metal cases were erected around them for protection. Enrollment was also disappointingly small, making it difficult to balance the books, so in 1840 Mason resigned, becoming rector of a church in North Carolina. With the college losing money, despite the lottery, and losing students too, the trustees turned again to Eliphalet Gilbert, who had attracted students and had been an excellent teacher and disciplinarian. He said he would accept the presidency again if several conditions were met. The first of these conditions was that the legislature change the law so that the college was no longer the direct recipient of the lottery money. Instead, the state must become the intermediary, making a direct appropriation to the college. If the state chose to raise the money it gave the college by a lottery, he would not object. So long as it came to the college from the state treasury the money was ‘‘laundered’’ to Gilbert’s satisfaction.

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Two more of Gilbert’s conditions need to be mentioned. One was a demand that as president of the college he should also become, ex officio, a member and president of the board of trustees. It would require that the legislature amend the charter, but it was necessary, in Gilbert’s mind, to assure his (and therefore Presbyterian) control of the college. Second, as vacancies occurred in the board of trustees, they would be filled (the board was self-perpetuating—that is, it filled its own ranks in case of vacancies) with Presbyterians until a Presbyterian majority was secured. In return, he promised that the Presbyterian synod would help make the college a distinguished institution, raising money, recruiting students, and bringing the college a high reputation so that it would become the major Presbyterian college in a four or five-state area west and south of the Delaware River, from Pennsylvania at least to Virginia. Gilbert was demanding no less than a Presbyterian takeover of the college. Yet the trustees were so eager to have him return that they capitulated completely, persuading the legislature to change the charter so that Gilbert would be both president of the college and president of the board of trustees. In 1841 three Presbyterian ministers, two of them from Philadelphia, were added to the board. In 1842 two Presbyterian laymen and three more Presbyterian ministers were added to the board. Objections were soon raised to the new order. Andrew Gray, ousted by Gilbert as president of the board, protested in 1843 that while there were then three Presbyterian ministers from Philadelphia on the board, there was only one trustee from Kent County and not even one from Sussex. The name was changed this year from Newark College to Delaware College, but Andrew Gray said it was a misnomer. ‘‘Delaware College is what it was originally named and what it ought to be,’’ he wrote. (Andrew Gray knew what he wrote about, for he was one of the assemblymen who played a leading role in incorporating Delaware College in 1821.) It was intended to be a state institution, he contended, but it had become a local Presbyterian seminary. The legislature investigated Gray’s charges, but in the end they supported Gilbert. They were satisfied that religion was not a test for employment on the faculty or for admission as a student, and they noted that almost all colleges had religious leadership of some sort. Testimony favorable to the college was presented in Dover by Thomas Blandy, a Newark Episcopalian, who was treasurer of the

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board of trustees, and the college was defended by Senator Charles I. du Pont, another Episcopalian. Delaware College had the promise of becoming a first-rate institution under Gilbert. Students were drawn from a wide area outside Delaware, not only from the neighboring states, but also from Virginia and North Carolina. Some excellent young scholars were appointed to the faculty, men who afterwards had notable careers at Harvard, Brown, Yale, and Pennsylvania. But in the end his Presbyterian connections let President Gilbert down. He received neither the financial help nor the number of students that he had promised the trustees a Presbyterian connection would bring. At the same time state assistance came to an end, for the lottery stopped in 1845. Up to that time the state had been transferring to the college an amount equivalent to the annual return on the lottery. When this source of funds dried up, the trustees had to begin to borrow from the endowment put aside in the past, for no college of any stature could make out on income from student fees alone. Discouraged, Gilbert resigned in 1847. He was succeeded by another, younger, but also distinguished Presbyterian minister named James Patriot Wilson. Though from Pennsylvania, Wilson had a Delaware heritage; Wilson’s grandfather, the Reverend Matthew Wilson of Lewes, had studied under Alison, taught at the academy, and sought to have it made a state college. Like Gilbert, Wilson could attract good faculty and good students, including some Choctaw Indians from Oklahoma. But he could not make ends meet except by drawing on capital from the endowment fund. After Wilson left early in 1850 some trustees wanted to close the college to save what was left of the endowment and operate only the preparatory school, the Academy of Newark, now housed in new brick buildings, still standing, on the site of the old academy built in colonial days. The academy continued to thrive through these years, partly because more students wanted (or were prepared for) an academic rather than a collegiate education, partly because the teachers, except the principal, were generally not college graduates and were paid very little. The story of Delaware College in the 1850s is, on the whole, a sad one. It had five presidents in nine years; three of them were Presbyterian ministers but two others were scholars of some distinction, scientists who were on the faculty before becoming president. The college tried to appeal to the people of Delaware by expanding its curriculum to include agriculture and engineering, but it had too

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little money to do much innovating. It tried to raise money by selling scholarships. For $500 a patron could buy the right to send one student to college tuition-free for twenty years, or twenty students for one year. A Presbyterian minister named Isaac Handy was hired, at a higher salary than professors were paid, to sell these scholarships. He sold many in Maryland and Virginia. The hope was to build up a large endowment, but too many scholarship students came to college too soon. The enrollment in college and the academy expanded so rapidly that instead of adding to the endowment the scholarship money had to be used for running expenses. The college authorities ultimately realized that their best hope of saving the institution was to get aid from the state. In 1855 the governor was made, ex officio, a member of the board of trustees. In 1857 the current governor, Peter F. Causey, proposed that the state pay Delaware College to accept one student from each school district (there were over one hundred districts). The legislature let this idea go, but it did consider a proposal from the president and faculty of Delaware College that the college be granted $3,000 a year to establish a normal school for the training of teachers. This bill won much support, especially from Sussex and Kent counties, but in the end it failed. The failure of the normal school bill sealed the fate of Delaware College. Most of the remainder of its endowment was used to buy up outstanding scholarships, and in March 1859 the college closed. Not for long, the trustees hoped. They kept the academy running and they dickered separately with groups of Presbyterians and Episcopalians who were interested in taking over the college. But these negotiations failed, the Civil War began, and eleven years passed before Delaware College reopened. When it did reopen in 1870, it was as a semi-state institution. In 1862 Congress had passed—and President Lincoln signed—the Morrill, or Land-Grant College Act. This provided a federal grant (in land or in warrants that could be exchanged for land) to every state that would agree to use the income derived from it for a college in which the leading subjects, without excluding others, would be agriculture and the mechanic arts, and including military science. For five years the State of Delaware spurned the Land-Grant Act; one of the Delaware senators declared it was unconstitutional. But finally the trustees of Delaware College and the General Assembly reached an agreement. The assembly would accept the federal grant and designate the school at Newark as its land-grant college. The trustees,

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on the other hand, would accept an altered charter in which one half of the college property—its land, buildings, books, apparatus— would become the property of the state. Furthermore, control of the board of trustees would be shared with the state: fifteen members would be nominees of the governor; an equal number would be chosen by the old board of trustees and would be self-perpetuating— that is, electing their own successors. The legislature also received the right to name thirty free scholars to Delaware College—one per legislator. It was a good deal for the state of Delaware. None of the money derived from the Land-Grant College Act could be spent for buildings, so starting a new college would have cost the state money. As it was, it acquired a land-grant college without spending a cent. It was a good deal for Delaware College. The new income was not large; it amounted to only $4,980 a year. But it was enough to allow the college to reopen and to limp along until the new relationship with the federal government and the state brought it substantially larger sums. Delaware College had at last cast off its ancient Presbyterian connection—a connection that was of colonial origin—and had entered upon a new state of life as a land-grant college.

Bibliographical note The two best histories of the academy and college through the years covered by this essay are Lyman P. Powell, The History of Education in Delaware (Washington, 1893), and William D. Lewis, University of Delaware: Ancestors, Friends, and Neighbors, in Delaware Notes, 34th series (1961). Valuable source material on the early academy before the Revolution is in the Records of the Presbyterian Church in America, 1706–1788, edited by Guy S. Klett (Philadelphia, 1976). Extracts from these records and a collection of papers, largely copies, of Francis Alison and Alexander McDowell are in the University of Delaware Archives. Valuable articles on the early academy include several by Thomas C. Pears, Jr.: ‘‘Francis Alison,’’ Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 29 (Dec. 1951): 213–25; ‘‘Colonial Education among Presbyterians,’’ ibid., 30 (June 1952): 115–26; ‘‘Francis Alison, Colonial Educator,’’ Delaware Notes, 17th series (1944), 9–22; ‘‘Ten Little Irish Lads,’’ University News (June 1943), 5, 9. The best work on the

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founder is a doctoral dissertation, ‘‘Francis Alison, American Philosophe, 1705–1779,’’ by Elizabeth A. Ingersoll [Nybakken] (University of Delaware, 1974). Two pertinent articles are George H. Ryden, ‘‘The Newark Academy of Delaware in Colonial Days,’’ Pennsylvania History 2 (Oct. 1935), 205–24; and Ryden, ‘‘The Relation of the Newark Academy of Delaware to the Presbyterian Church and to Higher Education in the American Colonies,’’ Delaware Notes, 9th series (1935): 7–42. Beverly McAnear wrote a series of useful articles: ‘‘The Charter of the Academy of Newark,’’ Delaware History 4 (Sept. 1950): 149–60; ‘‘College Founding in the American Colonies, 1745–1775,’’ Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42 (1955): 24–44; ‘‘The Raising of Funds by the Colonial Colleges,’’ ibid., 38 (1952): 591–612; and ‘‘The Selection of an Alma Mater by Pre-Revolutionary Students,’’ Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 73 (Oct. 1949): 429– 40. For general background see Leonard J. Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Reexamination of Colonial Presbyterianism (Philadelphia, 1972), and, as a corrective, Elizabeth I. Nybakken, ‘‘New Light on the Old Side: Irish Influences on Colonial Presbyterianism,’’ Journal of American History 68 (Mar. 1982): 813–32. For the history of the academy after 1783, see the minutes of the board of trustees in the University of Delaware Archives, which depository also has the minutes of the college board of trustees and of the college faculty. Here too is a valuable collection of all sorts of materials, including many primary sources, assembled by William D. Lewis and mounted in 48 volumes under the title of Delaware University Archives. On the beginnings of the college see Willa Cramton and Norman W. Moore, Jr., ‘‘A Forerunner to Delaware College and Its Popular Rejection,’’ Delaware History 12 (Oct. 1966): 121–46; Jane N. Garrett, ‘‘The Delaware College Lotteries, 1818–1845,’’ ibid., 7 (Sept. 1957): 299–318; George H. Ryden, ‘‘The Founding of the University of Delaware and Its First President, Dr. E. W. Gilbert,’’ Delaware Notes, 8th series (1934): 31–39. There are several articles on student life in the early college: H. Clay Reed, ‘‘Student Life at Delaware, 1834–1859,’’ Delaware Notes, 8th series (1934): 40–74; Richard C. Quick, ‘‘Murder at Delaware College: The Death of John Edward Roach, March 30, 1858,’’ ibid., 31st series (1958): 1–31; William D. Hoyt, Jr., ‘‘A Student’s Impressions of Newark College 105 Years Ago,’’ Delaware History 2 (Sept. 1947): 134–37. ‘‘The Diary of a Student at Delaware College, August 1853 to November 1854,’’ by Joseph Cleaver, Jr., edited by William D. Lewis, was published in Delaware Notes, 24th series

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(1951): 1–87, and a manuscript diary of David L. Mustard, 1852– 1854, is in the University Archives. On the closing of the college there is an article by George H. Ryden, ‘‘The Suspension of Delaware College in 1859 and Early but Unsuccessful Attempts at Its Reorganization,’’ in Delaware Notes, 8th series (1934): 75–83. On the suspension and reopening see Egbert G. Handy and James L Vallandigham, Jr., Newark, Delaware: Past and Present (Newark, 1882), and Edward N. Vallandigham, Fifty Years of Delaware College, 1870–1920 (Newark, 1920). The best bibliography is William D. Lewis, ‘‘A Finding List on the History of Newark, Delaware, and the University of Delaware, Its Predecessors and Associated Institutions,’’ Delaware Notes, 32nd series (1959): 33–69, with a supplement in ibid., 34th series (1961): 243, but H. Clay Reed and Marion B. Reed, A Bibliography of Delaware through 1960 (Newark, 1966), and a supplement prepared by the reference department of the Morris Library, Bibliography of Delaware, 1960–1974 (Newark, 1976), should also be consulted.

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14 The First Map of Delaware after Statehood I came to love maps when I was a boy in elementary school (1920–1925). All sorts of political changes were appearing in the atlases I saw, as the breakup of Austria-Hungary and the Russian and Ottoman empires allowed for the appearance of new countries like Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states. American maps had no such changes, but I was fascinated by the railroad lines on all the state maps, along with identifying initials like B & O or A C L (for Baltimore and Ohio and Atlantic Coast Line). Near the end of my active career I decided to write a map book, specifically a book on the mapping of Delaware similar to one I had seen on the mapping of New Jersey. I took innumerable notes on the subject, including the work of early Dutch and English cartographers. Unfortunately my eyes betrayed me, for as I grew older I found I could no longer distinguish faint words or marks on maps. I did, however, publish two scholarly articles from this research: ‘‘Benjamin Eastburn, Thomas Noxon and the First Map of the Lower Counties,’’ with John C. Dann, director of the Clements Library, Ann Arbor, as coauthor, and ‘‘Pierre Charles Varle´ and His Map of Delaware.’’ Both appeared in Delaware History, the former in vol. 21 (1985), pages 217–52, and the latter in vol. 22 (1986), pages 22–38. I had earlier written a newspaper column on Augustine Herrman’s map (published herein) and the following short piece, which appeared in Fully, Freely, and Entirely, the 1986 number of an annual published by the Delaware Heritage Commission.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION IT BECAME CLEAR THAT EVERY STATE SHOULD have a good map. Maps were needed for the planning of roads and canals, for the locations of lands and potential seaports, and for the navigation of rivers. Besides these practical reasons, there was an element of state pride involved. ‘‘Every state should have its own map,’’ wrote a Philadelphia map publisher in 1816, adding, ‘‘It should be state property, subject to the control of no individual whatever.’’ Today every state does publish an official map, usually a road map that it revises frequently. 245

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However, in the early years after the American Revolution the states generally left map making and map publishing up to private initiative. So it was with Delaware. The first maps of Delaware after it became a state were privately produced and had no official standing. It had not always been so. In colonial days the Delaware counties, closely allied to the large province to the north, enjoyed the services of the surveyor-general of Pennsylvania, as well as of deputy surveyors. One of the deputies, Thomas Noxon, founder of Noxontown, drew a map of Delaware in the 1730s, the first map known to have been devoted to this small colony alone. Using it as a base, the surveyor-general, Benjamin Eastburn, drew another map of the Delaware colony in 1737. These maps were never published. Instead they were kept in the surveyor’s office in Philadelphia and in the vaults of the Penn family in England, the Penns being the proprietors of Pennsylvania and Delaware. The Noxon map has long been lost, but the Eastburn map, after being forgotten for a century, has recently been rediscovered. (There is an article about it in the fall-winter 1985 issue of Delaware History magazine.) In their day, however, these maps were consulted. Besides furnishing information for Benjamin Eastburn, the Noxon map was used by another Pennsylvania surveyor, Lewis Evans, who prepared and published in 1749 a map of what he called ‘‘the Middle British Colonies in America,’’ by which he meant Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and the southwestern corner of New England. Evans’s map served as a basis for many others and through it Noxon’s lost map had an extensive influence. The chief proprietor, Thomas Penn (son of William) was displeased with Evans’s map because Evans showed Cape Henlopen precisely where it is today, at the entrance to Delaware Bay. Thomas Penn preferred to have Henlopen marked where the name had originally been applied, at what is now Fenwick Island, because his family’s claim to southern Sussex County, not finally adjudicated until 1750, depended on its location for Cape Henlopen. The Eastburn map, produced by an official of the Penns’government, had, of course, shown Henlopen at the old designation. This issue demonstrates the importance of maps to history. It was a Dutch sailor who gave the name Cape Henlopen to Fenwick Island, where he thought, incorrectly, that he saw a cape. This designation was followed on early Dutch maps, which were generally the best available, even in England, in the seventeenth century. The

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most popular of these Dutch maps was produced by a man named Nicholas Visscher in 1651. Reprinted and copied many times, it was responsible for the establishment of the southern boundary of Delaware where it is today. Long before that boundary was settled, the name Henlopen had moved up the coast to the true cape, near Lewes. If Charles, the fifth Lord Baltimore, who consented to a line drawn west from Fenwick Island, had consulted a map produced under the sponsorship of his own family, he would have known where Cape Henlopen was and might have been able to argue successfully in favor of a southern boundary for Delaware very close to Lewes, which would have put Georgetown, Laurel, Dagsboro, Rehoboth, and so forth, in Maryland. The map that a Maryland governor had sponsored (which his grandson did not consult in time) was drawn by Augustine Herrman, who received in return a great tract of land on the Eastern Shore that he called Bohemia Manor. His excellent map, published in 1673, is centered on the Chesapeake Bay, but like many other maps of nearby colonies, such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as well as Maryland and Virginia, it covers Delaware, too, though quite sketchily. Although included in maps of larger areas, Delaware was not the central image on any map until 1779. In that year John Churchman, a Quaker surveyor from Nottingham, completed a map ‘‘of the Peninsula between Delaware and Chesapeake Bays with said Bays and Shores adjacent.’’ Of course Delaware occupies a prominent place in this presentation of the Delmarva Peninsula and the bays and far shores on either side of it. Not until sixteen years later did Delaware get a map of its own. In 1795 Matthew Carey, an enterprising Irish immigrant who was becoming the leading Philadelphia publisher, reissued a two-volume English gazetteer that he called Guthrie’s Geography Improved. (The full title was A New System of Modern Geography, by William Guthrie.) This work, an alphabetical listing of place names with extensive descriptions, Carey decided to accompany with a volume of American maps. For this atlas he had more than twenty maps prepared, including one for each of the states. Many of the maps in Carey’s atlas were drawn by a Philadelphian named Samuel Lewis, but the authorship of Carey’s Delaware is unknown. On the map appeared only a title ‘‘Delaware from the best Authorities,’’ with the additional information that William Barker,

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of Philadelphia, had engraved it for ‘‘Carey’s American Edition of Guthrie’s Geography Improved.’’ A similar legend appeared on the Georgia map, and the titles of the other state maps were similar except that they usually gave a cartographer’s name. The Delaware map (which might conveniently be called the Carey-Barker map, after the publisher and the engraver, since the cartographer is unknown) is much clearer and more attractive than the Delaware portion of Churchman’s map, and it also gives many more details than Churchman does. The state and county lines are clear, as are the river and roads. Hundreds are labeled but not bounded. Shoals in the bay and the ocean are marked and, in most cases, named. The larger towns are differentiated from the smaller villages, although in 1795 all Delaware communities were relatively small, none deserving to be called a city. (Wilmington, the largest place, was officially a borough.) Some appear under other names than those they bear today: Smyrna, for example, is called ‘‘Salisbury or Duck Creek Cross Roads’’ and Milton is labeled ‘‘Broad Kill.’’ Rehoboth Beach is not marked at all, but Rehoboth Bay and Rehoboth Hundred are shown. This map, of course, is too early for the towns founded as railroad depots, like Delmar, Felton, Harrington, and Townsend, and also too early for Delaware City, created over thirty years later at the mouth of the canal. Some of the places marked on this map are hardly known today, like Hamburg (in New Castle County), Carroll Town, Grogue Town (now Kenton), Red House, Lewisville, and Berry Town (in Kent) and Shanklands, Douglas’s Forge, Lightfoot’s Furnace, and St. Johns (in Sussex). Selbyville, Millsboro, Seaford, Elsmere, and Claymont are among the present-day communities that are missing. This map, however, is sufficiently upto-date to include Georgetown, then less than five years old. In its generally accurate presentation of the coast, the CareyBarker maps showed Cape ‘‘Hinlopen’’ where it is today, though it also notes a ‘‘False Cape’’ at the Indian River Inlet. ‘‘Whore Kill Road’’ is marked in the bay off ‘‘Lewis town,’’ and ‘‘Pilot town’’ and ‘‘Plum Pt.’’ appear just up the coast. Jones’s Neck, Kitts ‘‘Hummocks,’’ and a ‘‘Deep Water Pt.’’ are labeled along the shore of Kent County. Farther north, Bombay Hook is labeled as an island, as it was; Reedy Island is also marked, but there is no hint of Pea Patch Island. On the southern boundary, the Cypress Swamp appears on both sides of the ‘‘Pokemoke’’ River. Near the northern boundary Jacob Broom’s dam (later bought by E. I. du Pont) and William Young’s mill are marked on the Brandywine, as are the larger Bran-

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dywine mills near tidewater. Aside from the mills, the Farmer Tavern is the only structure noted east of the Brandywine. Originally Carey sold his atlas in two versions: one, in black and white, for five dollars; the other, colored, for six dollars. (In the copy examined, the color could be seen only on the boundary lines; it may have faded elsewhere.) Carey used the map again in 1796 in what he called a ‘‘General Atlas,’’ and he continued to print it in later editions of this and other atlases for a number of years. In no time at all other publishers were also publishing atlases, and in 1801 a French engineer named Pierre Charles Varle´ prepared and published a splendid map of Delaware with his own soundings of the Delaware Bay. There had already been charts of navigation of Delaware waters. In the last part of the eighteenth century the most useful was the chart first published in 1756, drawn by Joshua Fisher, once a hatter in Lewes, and a British chart drawn by J. F. W. Des Barres (based on soundings and observations by a naval captain, Sir Andrew Snape Hammond), dated 1779 and issued in a collection called The Atlantic Neptune. Other maps dealt only with portions of Delaware, like Mason and Dixon’s 1768 map of the boundary line and John Filson’s 1785 map of Wilmington. Articles have been written about almost all of these maps, but until now the Carey-Barker map, though very frequently reproduced, has been otherwise strangely neglected.

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15 Delaware and the Constitution: An Overview of Events Leading to Ratification In 1787 as the nation celebrated the bicentennial of the writing of the Federal Constitution Delaware had the signal pleasure of celebrating its early ratification of this document, allowing this small entity to boast of being the first state. Of course our magazine, Delaware History, needed to take special note of these events. For the celebratory issue I wrote the following article, which was published in volume 22 (1987–1988), pages 219–38. It was not new material but largely a reexamination, using some new sources.

TO DELAWAREANS IT IS A MATTER OF CONSIDERABLE PRIDE THAT THEIR state was the first to ratify the Federal Constitution. The 1987 Wilmington area telephone directory lists forty-five different entries under the rubric ‘‘First State,’’ ranging from First State Ambulances to First State Video and including First State Bowling Center, First State Chiropractic Office, First State Pasta, and the First State School of Gymnastics.1 Thirty-one such names (some overlapping) are in the downstate phone book. The quick action that this popular appellation memorializes is not particularly characteristic of Delaware. In 1776, for instance, Delawareans were somewhat loath to break their connection with a benevolent (and neglectful) proprietary. In 1779, their state was the next-to-last to ratify the first basic law—the Articles of Confederation—of the new union. Dependence on the city of Philadelphia, however, and on the economic lifeline of the Delaware River, which gave access to Philadelphia markets and through them to the world beyond, made Delawareans acutely conscious (if the small size of their state was not warning enough) of the need for a strong intercolonial union and of the frailty of the Articles of Confederation as a bond for that union.2 To every attempt to strengthen the central government, Delaware 250

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lent support. Proposals to grant Congress power to tax imports and to control commerce won this small state’s acquiescence. Though supported by a decided majority of the states, those proposals still failed to be adopted because under the Articles all thirteen states had to agree to them, and such agreement was not obtained. When Virginia sought a solution to the problem of regulation of trade through an intercolonial conference at Annapolis in September 1786, Delaware was one of five states represented there. Though more delegations were on the way, the conference, with a Delaware delegate, John Dickinson, presiding, decided that the ills of the existing government required consideration of more than just commercial questions. To that end they adopted a report calling for another convention, to meet in Philadelphia in May 1787 to consider ‘‘the situation of the United States’’ and to devise ‘‘provisions . . . necessary to render the Constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.’’3 One of Delaware’s delegates to Annapolis, George Read, who was also a member of the upper house of the General Assembly, took the lead in assuring Delaware’s representation in the 1787 convention. Though due to sit on the bench at a session of the continental admiralty court, Read requested a postponement so that he could attend the assembly, explain the proceedings at Annapolis, and urge the election of delegates to Philadelphia.4 Read’s dominant role in Delaware politics was recognized by friend and foe alike.5 For some years he had been irritated by the claims of many other states to the western lands beyond the Appalachians and at the failure of Congress to limit these claims.6 Now, in the winter of 1787, he was concerned how to protect the interests of his small state in a reorganized union, particularly as he observed the leading role Virginians were taking in the convention movement. In January 1787, Read determined on a protective step for Delaware and other small states. ‘‘Finding that Virginia hath again taken the lead . . . it occurred to me,’’ he wrote to John Dickinson on January 17, ‘‘as a prudent measure on the part of our State, that the legislature should . . . restrain the power’’ of the Delaware delegates by insisting they must not agree to any alteration of the equal vote in Congress allowed Delaware by the Articles of Confederation (which was also the rule in the Continental Congress before the Articles were adopted). Delaware’s very existence as a state, in his mind, depended on preserving that right. ‘‘Such is my jealousy of most of the

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larger States,’’ he continued, ‘‘that I would trust nothing to their candor, generosity, or ideas of public justice in behalf of this State.’’ It was important, Read saw, to have that insistence on equality written into the instructions of the Delaware delegates, for once the convention was underway, ‘‘argument or oratory . . . will avail little.’’ A legislative restraint on their actions, on the other hand, would prevent ‘‘disagreeable argumentation.’’7 As usual, Read secured what he wanted from the legislature. The instructions of the Delaware delegates, adopted February 3, 1787, directed them to seek ‘‘such Alterations and further Provisions as may be necessary to render the Federal Constitution adequate to the Exigencies of the Union,’’ so long as ‘‘such Alterations . . . do not extend to that part of the Fifth Article of the Confederation . . . which declares that ‘In determining Questions in the United States in Congress Assembled each State shall have one Vote.’ ’’8 It is probable that Read’s role in the choice of delegates was as great as his part in phrasing their instructions. In that choice, however, the important decisions were probably made in 1786, rather than in 1787. It was in June 1786 that the General Assembly chose delegates to represent Delaware at the Annapolis Convention. Since the same delegates were chosen in 1787, without contest, to attend the Philadelphia convention, the choice in June 1786 bears looking into. In 1786 there was a contest. How heated it was is not clear, but the lower house, then called the House of Assembly, started the process of selection. Five men were nominated as delegates, but when those nominations were sent to the upper house, that body, called the Legislative Council, demurred. Since the session of February 1777, the council told the House, all appointments to important public offices had been made by a joint meeting of the two houses, first for nominations, ‘‘and after, to elect by ballot.’’ The House agreed; it was, after all, the more numerous body, having twenty-one members as opposed to the nine members of the council. It was hardly wise for it to abandon the customary practice. And so a joint session was held, on June 16, 1786, to nominate delegates. The names of those nominated are not known, but presumably House members would have nominated the five men whose names they had already submitted to the council: George Read, Gunning Bedford, Jr., William Peery, Eleazer McComb, and Jacob Broom. On the following day, June 17, a second joint session was held, this time to elect. No details of the election are known, except

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the outcome. Three of the House choices were selected—Read, Bedford, and Broom—but for Peery and McComb the joint session substituted John Dickinson and Richard Bassett.9 Dickinson and Bassett were men of more significance than Peery and McComb, whom they replaced, and this may be sufficient reason for the preference given them. It is possible, however, that the rivalries of Delaware politics played a part in the choice. Peery and McComb were both affiliated with the radical Whig faction in Delaware, the faction that sought to keep quondam Tories and pacifists from participation in postwar Delaware politics. Peery, a lawyer from Lewes and a former Revolutionary officer, was an active partisan in the factional broils in Sussex County and was at that time a member of the Continental Congress. McComb, a Kent County merchant, was less controversial than Peery, but he too had served in Congress, where he had been a colleague of Dr. James Tilton, principal spokesman in the 1780s for the radical Whig faction. Peery and McComb were both Presbyterians, which implied a political connection distasteful to downstate Episcopalians and Methodists, primarily because they were a new immigrant group, mainly Scotch-Irish, who threatened to disturb the status quo.10 As has been noted already, the delegation chosen to go to Annapolis in 1786 was reelected—without contest, as far as is known—to the Philadelphia convention in 1787. Only three of the five delegates had actually traveled to Annapolis, but the absence of the others (the two youngest delegates) did not seem to matter to the legislature. Among the delegates there was a pronounced division into two groups on the basis of age and experience.11 Dickinson and Read, who were fifty-five and fifty-four respectively, were the senior members. They were, moreover, lifelong friends from the days of their common apprenticeship in a Philadelphia law office.12 Though decidedly the best-known Delawarean on the national scene, Dickinson had only limited interest in Delaware politics. Despite his fame as author of the Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania and other writings that won him recognition as the early ‘‘penman of the Revolution,’’ Dickinson’s reputation went into eclipse after he opposed declaration of American independence in July 1776. It was Read who brought Dickinson back into the arena of Delaware politics in 1781 with election to the Legislative Council (from Read’s political base, New Castle County, rather than from Kent County, site of Dickinson’s Delaware residence). Election as chief

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executive (president and commander in chief was the title) followed, by the vote of every member of both houses except for one vote—Dickinson’s.13 Some of his popularity in Delaware was probably lost when he abandoned the Delaware position for a similar post in Pennsylvania, in whose politics Dickinson obviously felt a stronger interest. But in Delaware he remained respected as an elder statesman outside of local factional struggles (for the time being). His position on the war was understood in Delaware. Not a practicing Quaker himself, at least during the major part of his life, he was surrounded by Quaker influences. His mother was a Quaker; his wife was a Quaker; his children were Quakers. Despite obvious pacifist inclinations he supported a just war for American rights (not necessarily complete independence), held a commission as colonel in the Pennsylvania militia, and turned out with the Delaware militia as a private soldier in 1777 when the British invaded. A very wealthy landholder, he had won respect from his neighbors for many benefactions. In 1787 he was newly settled in Wilmington, a site chosen as a compromise between his ancestral home in Kent County and his wife’s preference for Philadelphia.14 Read, though less distinguished nationally than Dickinson, was the real leader of the Delaware delegation, in terms of his standing in state politics and in the legislature. Active in continental affairs in the early years of the Revolution, he had retreated to local politics, probably motivated both by the weakness of Congress and the demands of an active law practice, on which his livelihood depended. His calm hand did much to bring Delaware, a state with ardent Whig and Tory sympathizers—and possibly with a majority of people for whom the war was less important than other concerns—through those troubled years with none but local disturbances.15 Richard Bassett’s background bears a slight resemblance to Dickinson’s. Maryland-born, he had inherited a grand estate called Bohemia Manor in Cecil County. After study in a private law office, he set up practice in Delaware, where he resided in Dover (and later also had a house in Wilmington). Though holding a commission in the militia, his enthusiasm for military service was probably diminished by his increasing involvement in the missionary activities of Francis Asbury and other Methodist preachers, who tended to be pacifists. Bassett’s first wife, Ann Ennalls, came from one of the earliest Eastern Shore families to join the Methodists.16 Bassett was forty-two years old in 1787, while Gunning Bedford, Jr., the fourth member in age of the Delaware delegation, was then

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forty. The three older members of the delegation were born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, but Bedford was born in Pennsylvania. A Princeton graduate, and a classmate of James Madison, he was the only member of the delegation to have attended college. Settling in Dover for the practice of law, he was soon appointed attorney-general of Delaware, probably through the influence of his cousin, also named Gunning Bedford, who was the brother-in-law of George Read. Early in the Revolution he served as muster-master-general of the continental army. After moving to Delaware he was three times elected to the Continental Congress. His vigor in debate may have led to his political advancement. Though a Presbyterian, his family connections probably kept him from being the object of the intolerance shown toward many of his sect.17 The youngest of the Delaware delegates, Jacob Broom, was the only Delaware native among them and the only one not trained as a lawyer. (Dickinson had long given up practice, however.) Though reputed to be the son of a blacksmith, Broom had attended the Wilmington Academy, an indication that his family had at least some modest financial resources. At thirty-five in 1787, he had acquired political standing as chief burgess of Wilmington and a member of the state legislature. Very likely he was in the delegation because in its original selection for the Annapolis convention the stress was on commercial affairs, and he was the only member of the delegation who was a merchant and who represented Wilmington, the largest community and chief commercial center of Delaware. Dickinson had moved to Wilmington in 1785, but he was a new resident and hardly representative of it. A map drawn by Broom, who was early trained as a surveyor, is said to have been useful to George Washington at the Battle of the Brandywine.18 The attendance record of Delaware’s delegates at Philadelphia was good. Three of the five were present when the convention was convened on May 27, and the others, Bedford and Dickinson, appeared within two days. Dickinson was the only Delaware delegate who missed any notable time. Last to arrive and first to leave (he had Read sign the Constitution for him), he appeared weak and feeble to a French observer and often complained of ill health—though he lived twenty more years for a longer life span than any other Delaware delegate.19 Even before the credentials of the Delaware delegates were presented to the convention, knowledge of their content had aroused a certain degree of dismay, particularly among Virginia’s delegates.

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Those men were preparing to introduce a plan of reorganization that included proportional rather than equal representation in a new, strengthened Congress.20 Two days after the convention met, the Virginians, through their governor, Edmund Randolph, introduced their plan for a stronger national government. Read rose to the challenge, and on the very next day, May 30, moved they postpone consideration of the portion of the plan dealing with representation. He played his trump card at once, reminding the delegates, according to Madison’s notes, ‘‘that the deputies from Delaware were restrained by their commission from assenting to any changes of the rule of suffrage, and in case such a change should be fixed on, it might become their duty to retire from the Convention.’’21 Read won his point. Discussion of representation was postponed for the moment. Still, even though in the convention, as in the Continental Congress, all states had an equal vote, Delaware was in a decided minority. Some states that might have been allied with Delaware, such as New Hampshire and New Jersey, were slow in getting representatives to Philadelphia. Rhode Island, the only state smaller in territory, never did send a delegation. The best that the Delaware delegates could do for the moment was to delay a decision on representation. The delay, however, allowed the small states to concoct a rival plan, a plan that was essentially only a revision of the Articles of Confederation and that left the equal representation of the states undisturbed. Presented to Congress by William Paterson of New Jersey on June 15, it is known as the New Jersey Plan, but delegates from Delaware, as well as from New York and Connecticut (and one from Maryland) had all shared in its formulation. The emergence of the New Jersey Plan brought discussion of the major issue dividing delegates, the question of representation, to a climax. There was general agreement that the central government needed to be strengthened, and though there were many differences of opinion on the degree of power to be ceded by the states and on details of organization of the strengthened government, no other issue divided the delegates as representation did.22 Almost two weeks before the New Jersey Plan was presented, John Dickinson suggested what became known as the Great Compromise. There must be mutual concessions on representation in Congress, he argued on June 2, expressing his hope that the states would retain an equal voice in one branch of the national legislature.23

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On reflection, at an unknown later date, Dickinson was proud of his early espousal of that idea. ‘‘In the Convention at Philadelphia in 1787,’’ an undated note in his hand attests, ‘‘I proposed the establishment of that Branch [the Senate], with an equal Representation therein of every State—assenting, in consideration of such a provision, to the Establishment of the other Branch, on another Principal.’’24 Probably Dickinson was not the first to propose the equality of states in one house of the new Congress. On May 31, for instance, Roger Sherman of Connecticut suggested that each state legislature should elect one senator.25 On June 7, with Sherman seconding him, Dickinson moved that members of the Senate should be chosen by the state legislatures. According to Madison, this proposal, which was accepted, did not involve any decision on the number of members but was based on a desire to preserve a place for the state governments in the new system and to encourage the selection of the ablest representatives of the states.26 Though for the moment the large states seemed to have their way and the New Jersey Plan lacked the support accorded the stronger central government provided by the Virginia Plan, the issue of representation would not fade. On June 30 Gunning Bedford, Jr., pleaded the cause of the small states with unequalled ardor. The large states, he argued, were ‘‘closely united in one scheme of interest and ambition,’’ and he referred venomously to South Carolina, in particular, as ‘‘puffed up with the possession of her wealth and negroes.’’ ‘‘I do not, gentlemen, trust you,’’ he continued, according to notes kept by Robert Yates of New York. And he continued, in words that shocked some of his colleagues: ‘‘Will you crush the smaller states, or must they be left unmolested? Sooner than be ruined, there are foreign powers who will take us by the hand.’’27 Edmund Randolph disapproved of this ‘‘warm and rash language.’’ Rufus King chided Bedford for speaking ‘‘with a vehemence unprecedented’’ in the convention. In private conversation the following day, Washington, whose sympathy with the Virginia Plan was well known, was ‘‘much dejected’’ at ‘‘the deplorable state of things.’’ Gouverneur Morris, frequently intemperate in speech, heaped coals on the fire in response to Bedford with a threat of his own: ‘‘This Country must be united. If persuasion does not unite it, the sword will.’’28 Bedford found it necessary to apologize. ‘‘Some allowance,’’ he

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suggested, ‘‘ought to be made for the habits of his profession in which warmth was natural and sometimes necessary,’’ but as a good lawyer he used the occasion to note that he was provoked by such remarks as Morris’s and by the statement of Nathaniel Gorham, a delegate from Massachusetts, that Delaware should be annexed to Pennsylvania and New Jersey divided between Pennsylvania and New York.29 Before Bedford offered his apology, events had begun to look more favorable for the small states. A new committee with one member from each state had been instructed to work out a plan for representation. Chosen by ballot, the committee had a preponderance of members sympathetic to the small states. Bedford represented Delaware on the committee, which suggests that his vehemence had not destroyed his standing with his colleagues. Not quickly, but eventually (on July 16) the convention accepted the committee’s proposal that each state have an equal vote in the upper house.30 Once equality in the Senate was assured, the Delaware delegates, like others from the small states, became supporters of a strong national government. But what of their instructions? As Read had said in the convention, they were ‘‘restrained . . . from assenting to any change of the rule of suffrage,’’ and certainly that rule was changed by agreement on proportional representation in the House of Representatives. The explanation is that they had made the best use of their instructions that was possible, and they knew it. Equality in the Senate was the best arrangement they could hope for. Through Read’s agency, they had written their own instructions, and they had no doubts about acceptability in Delaware of the compromise they had secured. The restraining proviso that Read had written into their instructions (and that possibly no one else in the legislature would have thought of ) had given them the leverage they hoped for in moving the convention toward establishing the Senate on a basis that was to their liking. With assurance of their status in the new union, Delaware’s delegates wanted to see the government made strong because they had no illusions about the ability of their small state to prosper except as part of a large nation. George Read, father of the stratagem embodied in the Delaware instructions, almost abandoned it long before success was achieved. What mattered to him most, apparently, was to win for Delaware a share in the Western lands. If a fund were made up of profits from land sales beyond the Appalachians, and if this fund were ‘‘applied

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fairly and equally’’ to discharge debts from the war, then Read would give up his arguments for the equality of the states in Congress. Indeed, he would go further. ‘‘We must put away state governments,’’ he said, ‘‘and we will then remove all causes of jealousy.’’ On another occasion he argued that ‘‘too much attachment is betrayed to the State Governments. We must look beyond their continuance. A national Govt. must soon of necessity swallow all of them Up.’’31 Of all the plans presented to the convention Read liked Alexander Hamilton’s best, because it provided for the strongest, most centralized government. To strengthen the executive, Read wished to give the president an absolute veto over laws. He would also have had senators serve for life, or, at the least, for nine-year terms.32 As befit his status as the youngest member of the Delaware delegation, Jacob Broom had little to say in the convention. As far as can be learned, he was, like George Read, an ultranationalist, for he favored a life term for the president and he seconded a motion to give Congress the power to nullify all state laws interfering with the general interests and the harmony of the Union. When a delegate from New Jersey despaired of any accomplishment and suggested disbanding, Broom urged that they proceed: ‘‘Something must be done by the Convention tho’ it should be by a bare majority.’’33 Richard Bassett, like Broom, had little to say in the convention. Another delegate described Bassett as ‘‘gentlemanly’’ and ‘‘a Man of good sense,’’ with ‘‘modesty enough to hold his Tongue.’’ In at least one case he proved less of a nationalist than Read or Broom, since he opposed giving Congress a veto over state laws.34 In contrast to Read and Broom, Gunning Bedford, Jr., seems to have been the least nationalistic of Delaware’s delegates. Besides his tirade against the nationalist plans of the large states, he betrayed his sympathies on other occasions. For instance, he strongly opposed a long term, let alone a life term, for the president, arguing that even the possibility of impeachment would be no remedy for sheer incapacity.35 It is interesting—but not really surprising, in view of their later careers—to notice that John Dickinson’s position frequently diverged from that of his friend George Read. In the convention, as in life, it is difficult to characterize Dickinson. By no means was he willing to see the states obliterated in the new system. He envisioned the states operating within defined orbits like the planets in the solar system. He would have allowed the president to be removable at the request of the states and yet he would have allowed the national gov-

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ernment to void state laws. To Dickinson, a limited monarchy, like England’s, was the best of all governments, but it was not a possibility for America. As a practicing abolitionist who had freed his own slaves, it is not strange that he wanted to give Congress power to restrain or forbid slave importation. As a critic of unlimited power, he wanted to surround the president with an executive council that could serve as a check on his power; he sought to make judges removable by the president at the request of both houses of Congress; and he wished to retain in the states the ultimate control of their militia. Dickinson’s was an independent course, perhaps a bit quixotic, and in some cases he had no support among his colleagues. Sometimes he was with Read and the ultranationalists, as when he insisted on the supremacy of the national legislature over the states. On another occasion he sounded like Bedford, warning Madison that some delegates from small states who were ‘‘friends to a good National Movement . . . would sooner submit to a foreign power than submit to be deprived of an equality of suffrage in both branches of the legislature.’’36 Perhaps he spoke too much, too feebly, and maybe even too unsystematically to be very effective, but his opinions are interesting. Although one of the wealthiest men in the convention, he opposed any ‘‘veneration for wealth’’; on the contrary, he thought ‘‘a veneration for poverty and virtue were the objects of republican government.’’ But his veneration for poverty did not extend to allowing the landless to vote; he wished the franchise restricted to freeholders, ‘‘the owners of the soil,’’ for ‘‘the Owners of the Country’’ are ‘‘the best guardians of liberty.’’ Fortunately this was ‘‘the great mass of our citizens,’’ so a restriction of this sort was not a step toward aristocracy; merchants and mechanics could become freeholders when they wished. Though a product of a century called the Age of Reason, Dickinson warned that ‘‘experience must be our only guide; reason may mislead us.’’37 It was reason combined with their experience under the Articles of Confederation that left Delaware’s delegates pleased with their work when the convention adjourned on September 17. All were willing to put their names to the new constitution—Dickinson through Read, as mentioned before. Once home in Delaware, they worked in varying degrees to win acceptance. Again it was George Read who could be the most effective, for he alone of the delegates was a member of the new legislature that met in October. The old legislature had scheduled a special meeting for

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late August, ‘‘being desirous,’’ they said, of giving the new ‘‘system of Government [their] earliest attention for the purpose of relieving the Union from the embarrassment of their present inefficient System.’’ But since the Philadelphia convention had not completed its work, the legislature adjourned on August 29, ‘‘the present engagements of divers of the Members not admitting their regular attendance at this busy Season of the Year.’’38 September 17, when the delegates at Philadelphia finally completed their work, was only two weeks before October 1, when the annual election of assemblymen was held in Delaware, so action on the constitution was delayed until the new assembly could meet. Meanwhile there was time for interested Delawareans to be informed about the new document. The delay also gave Congress, meeting in New York, time to receive the Constitution and transmit copies to the states, a process called for in the original instructions to Delaware’s delegates. On September 28, the Continental Congress, with two Delaware delegates (Dyre Kearny and Nathaniel Mitchell) in attendance, acknowledged receipt of the Constitution—without a word as to approval or disapproval—and ordered copies sent to the states to be submitted to state conventions as provided for in the eighth and last article of the document.39 Before the chief executive of Delaware, President Thomas Collins, could receive a copy of the Constitution from Congress, he had received a copy from George Read and had promised ‘‘to give every aid’’ in his power to the proceedings necessary to put it into effect. Collins hoped there would be little opposition. Apparently he did not notice that the proceedings were already deficient in one respect. The instructions of the Delaware delegates declared that the work of the Philadelphia convention should be ‘‘agreed to’’ by the Continental Congress and ‘‘confirmed by the several States.’’40 Congress had transmitted the Constitution without a word about agreement with it, and the Constitution itself required ratification by only nine of the states, not the confirmation ‘‘by the several states’’ that the Delaware instructions had called for. However, the whole procedure of revising the government through a convention was adopted as a means of getting around an impractical requirement of unanimous approval of amendments to the Articles of Confederation, so advocates of change were not going to be hindered by such technical deficiencies in their proceedings. When the General Assembly convened (the House on October 24, 1787, and the Legislative Council on October 25) Collins laid the

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Constitution before the members, accompanied by a message stressing the importance of calling a convention for its ratification. ‘‘Not only our prosperity and felicity, but perhaps our national existence’’ were dependent on its adoption, Collins’s message claimed. Five petitions from New Castle County supported Collins’s plea for haste in ratifying the Constitution.41 Crippled by the absence of assemblymen from Sussex, where the election result was disputed, the General Assembly revised its requirement for a quorum from two-thirds to a simple majority of the members. (Otherwise, the absence of only one member of the House of Assembly would have prevented any action.) Thereafter the assembly spent more than a week in preoccupation with the Sussex election disputes.42 They posed an immediate problem, even granted a desire to proceed at once toward ratification of the Constitution, because there was every likelihood that those disputes would disrupt elections to the ratifying convention. Finally on November 10 the General Assembly took action, calling a special election on November 26 of delegates to a convention empowered to approve the Constitution. Ten delegates were to be chosen by the qualified voters of each county, a number equal to the total of representatives in the two houses. As in assembly elections, there would be only one polling place in each county. New Castle and Dover, county seats of the two upper counties, would be polling places, as usual, but the elections in Sussex were moved from Lewes to Vaughan’s Furnace, in Nanticoke Hundred, presumably to avoid the riotous scenes that had occurred in Sussex in October. However, more was involved than removing the elections from a scene of riot. Lewes was the center of strength of the radical Whig party in Sussex, home of a number of active Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who were not reconciled to political participation by those Sussex residents who had been lukewarm patriots, pacifists, or, in radical eyes, even worse during the Revolution. Nanticoke Hundred was in an area acquired from Maryland only in 1775, when the boundary was finally settled. The voters here were likely to be of English descent and Anglican (Episcopalian) or Methodist in religion. They could be counted on to support the moderate party in Delaware politics, the party more willing to forgive and forget aberrations during the late war. As far as the ratifying convention was concerned, it made no difference where the election was held. The two factions in Sussex had no disagreement on the Constitution. But since the assembly had

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voided the Sussex elections of October 1787, it was necessary to repeat the county elections of assemblymen, sheriff, and coroner. It did make a difference where those elections were held. Radical Whigs, who had threatened their moderate Sussex brethren at the polls in Lewes, would be at a disadvantage in western Sussex, at Vaughan’s Furnace.43 Those controversies affected ratification of the Constitution in Delaware in only one way: they delayed it. When the election was held on November 26, it proceeded smoothly in New Castle and Kent. In the former county a Whig ticket prevailed that included Gunning Bedford, Jr., but did not include George Read or Jacob Broom—or, for that matter, John Dickinson. It did, however, include Gunning Bedford, Sr., Read’s brother-in-law, and at least one other man usually affiliated with Read’s faction. In Kent, the moderates prevailed, including Richard Bassett in their number. In neither place is there any indication of a heated contest.44 In Sussex it was a different story. Radical Whig voters complained of being intimidated and sent their protests to the convention that convened in Dover on Monday, December 3. The convention minutes are lost so we know few details of its proceedings. On the first day the members organized, electing James Latimer of New Castle County to be their presiding officer. On the next day President Collins formally transmitted a copy of the Constitution for their ‘‘assent and ratification.’’ ‘‘As it is a subject of the first magnitude,’’ he added, ‘‘you will pay that attention thereto as it justly merits.’’ He also asked their attention to a suggestion of the General Assembly that land be offered to the new government for a possible site of a permanent capital. At some time, very likely on the first day, the convention received a group of at least nine petitions from Sussex County arguing that the election had been unfairly conducted and that a new election should be ordered because the Constitution could not be ‘‘considered as binding’’ on all classes of citizens ‘‘without their assent.’’ Despite the complaints, the members named in the Sussex sheriff ’s return were seated and the convention went about its business. The composition of the convention was not in itself of great significance to the radical Whig party. Their interest was in the election of new assemblymen, and they raised the election issue at the convention ‘‘without . . . any desire to incommode that body,’’ according to Dr. Tilton’s partisan account, ‘‘but merely as preparatory to their in-

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tended remonstrance against the election of representatives, at the next meeting of the legislature.’’45 The convention completed its work in one week. As authorized by the legislature, it agreed, by a five-to-one vote, to offer land for the capital to the federal government. And, most important, it unanimously ratified the federal constitution. Possibly it voted on the Constitution as early as Thursday, December 6; possibly not until the following day. The time between the session on December 6 and the final session on December 7 may have given opportunity for preparation of a formal instrument of ratification, which was approved, dated, and signed by the members on December 7, thereafter celebrated as Delaware Day. The document left little doubt of their sentiment. They ‘‘approved, assented to, ratified, and confirmed’’ the Constitution ‘‘fully, freely, and entirely.’’46 Though the priority of Delaware in ratifying the Constitution has been an object of pride to Delawareans from that day to this, it is only through mischance that Delaware did not act sooner. The General Assembly had met in late August for the express purpose of taking speedy action on the Constitution. Since the Philadelphia convention did not complete its work until September 17, action in Delaware waited on the elections of October 1. Those elections were marred by delays and disputes in Sussex County, disputes wholly unconnected with the Constitution, and the election of a convention, being joined to a new election of Sussex assemblymen, was delayed until November 26, decidedly later than the election of a convention in neighboring Pennsylvania, where voters were not nearly so much of one mind about the Constitution. If it is remarkable that Delaware did not ratify the Constitution before it did, it is also remarkable that opinion in a state with such bitter factional disputes was nearly unanimous on this issue. Richard Henry Lee, passing through Wilmington in November, tried to stir up feeling against the Constitution, but he exerted himself in vain. An unfriendly reporter wrote that he spent an evening abusing the new government ‘‘to a group of school boys and hostlers, who have since made themselves very merry at his expense’’47 The unanimity of the Delaware convention may be placed beside a similar unanimity in the conventions of the third and fourth states to ratify, New Jersey and Georgia, and similar reasons may be suggested, although the situation of Georgia was different from that of the two middle states. All three, however, saw their future safety and

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hope of prosperity tied to their inclusion with other states in a firm compact under a strong government. The delegates of Delaware at the Philadelphia convention put themselves, in various ways, at the service of the new government. George Read and Richard Bassett were elected from Delaware to the first Senate of the United States. Gunning Bedford, Jr., was a presidential elector in 1789, and before the year was over accepted appointment from President Washington as the first federal district judge of this state. Jacob Broom, a less prominent man in politics, accepted a less prominent post, appointment as postmaster of Wilmington. And John Dickinson, complaining of ill health and relishing the position of an elder statesman when only in his fifties, wanting no new responsibilities, stirred himself in the spring of 1788 to publish in the Delaware Gazette a series of nine essays (signed ‘‘Fabius’’) urging laggard states to ratify the Constitution.48 No state had more to gain from adherence to the Constitution, and the people of Delaware knew it.

Notes 1. It seems strange that there were only two such entries in the 1935 phone book—the First State Motors and the First State Supply Company. On the other hand, the 1935 book, covering an area from Claymont to Smyrna, has eleven listings under Diamond State. The latter term remains popular; the eleven Diamond State listings have expanded to thirty-five in 1987, but this is nothing like the growth in First State listings, from two to forty-five. 2. To some Delawareans, especially those living near the Nanticoke River and its tributaries, trade on the Chesapeake was a major concern. For additional background, see John A Munroe, Federalist Delaware, 1775–1815 (New Brunswick, 1954). 3. Winton Solberg, ed., The Federal Convention and the Formation of the Union (Indianapolis, 1958), 58–59. The report went on to state that whatever provision was drawn up at the Philadelphia convention should be reported to Congress for its approval and then should be ‘‘confirmed by the Legislatures of every State.’’ 4. William T. Read, Life and Correspondence of George Read (Philadelphia, 1870), 421–23. 5. His enemy, Dr. James Tilton, made Read the villainous protagonist of his Biographical History of Dionysius, Tyrant of Delaware, ed. by John A. Munroe (Newark, 1958). His friends testified to their support by electing him to any position he would accept. One among them, John Dickinson, owed his return to political favor in Delaware largely to Read’s sponsorship. One testimony to their friendship is found in a letter from Dickinson to Read’s widow, Gertrude, June 25, 1799, in Read, Read, 569. 6. See John A. Munroe, ‘‘Nonresident Representation in the Continental Congress: the Delaware Delegation of 1782,’’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 9

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(1952): 166–90. Read’s sentiments on western lands were very likely influenced by his friendship with such Philadelphia speculators as Samuel Wharton. 7. Read, Read, 438–39; Max Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, 1911), 3: 575–76n. Delaware elected its delegates before Congress approved the Philadelphia convention, as it did on February 21, 1787. 8. Farrand, Records, 3: 574–75. 9. Votes of the House of Assembly, 1786, pp. 12–16. Dr. John R. Kern kindly called this reference to my attention. 10. George V. Massey II, ‘‘Eleazer McComb Letters,’’ Delaware History 2 (1947): 41–55; Thomas Scharf, History of Delaware, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1888), 1: 569; Lynn Perry, ed., Some Letters of and Concerning Major William Peery (Strasburg, Va., 1935). 11. There are studies of the economic interests of the five Delaware delegates in Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York, 1923), 75–77, 80–81, 87–88, 140–41, and in Forrest McDonald, We The People, The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago, 1958), 29–30, 64–67. 12. Read, Read, 12. 13. Milton E. Flower, John Dickinson, Conservative Revolutionary (Charlottesville, 1983), 198, 200–201. 14. The best source on Dickinson is Flower, John Dickinson. 15. For Read, see the good, old-fashioned biography by William Thompson Read already cited. For local disturbances see Harold Hancock, The Loyalists of Revolutionary Delaware (Newark, 1977); [Tilton], Biographical History of Dionysius; and John R. Kern’s article on the Sussex County riots in this issue. 16. Robert E. Pattison, The Life and Character of Richard Bassett (Wilmington, 1900); William H. Williams, The Garden of American Methodism (Wilmington, 1984), 99–100. 17. The best biography of Bedford to date is the brief sketch by W. Frank Craven in Princetonians, 1769–1775, ed. by Richard A. Harrison (Princeton, 1980), 131–35. 18. Emerson Wilson, Forgotten Heroes of Delaware (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 75–76. 19. Farrand, Records, 1: 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 16, 17; 3: 20–22, 24–26, 81, 237 (weak & feeble), 587–90 (attendance). 20. Farrand, Records, 1: 4; 3: 28. 21. Farrand, Records, 1: 37, 40. Cf. Max Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution of the United States (New Haven, 1913; paperback reprint, 1962), 68 ff. 22. Farrand, Framing of the Constitution, 84–85, 91–92, 105. 23. Farrand, Records, 1: 87; Flower, Dickinson, 243. 24. Farrand, Records, 3: 554. 25. Ibid., 1: 52. 26. Ibid., 1: 136, 137, 148, 150, 152, 156. 27. Ibid., 1: 500–501. 28. Ibid.. 1: 493, 514, 530. 29. Ibid., 1: 531 30. Farrand, Framing, 97–99, 104–5; James T. Flexner, George Washington and the New Nation (1783–1793) (Boston, 1970), 130. 31. Farrand, Records, 1: 136, 206, 405, 412. 32. Ibid.. 1: 409, 421, 463, 471; 11: 200; Farrand, Framing, 87–89. 33. Farrand, Records, 2: 19, 33, 390.

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34. Ibid., 1: 168; 3: 92. 35. Ibid.. 1: 68. 36. Ibid., 1: 168, 242, 327; 2: 292, 331, 372, 416, 428, 542, 543; The Delegate from New York, or Proceedings of the Federal Convention of 1787 from the Notes of John Lansing, Jr., ed. by Joseph R. Strayer (Princeton, 1939), 36, 38, 41, 61. Lansing also reported Bedford’s famous speech, p. 99. 37. Farrand, Records, 2: 123, 202, 207, 209, 78. 38. Leon de Valinger, Jr., How Delaware Became the First State (Dover, 1970), 17; Merrill Jensen, ed., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, 3, Ratification of the Constitution by the States: Delaware, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut (Madison, 1978), 49–51. Bassett, Bedford, and Broom had been members of the House of Assembly in 1786–87 but were not elected to the new legislature of 1787– 1788, probably because they had no time to campaign. Read was a holdover member of the upper house. 39. Solberg, Federal Convention, 365; Robert A. Rutland, The Ordeal of the Constitution: The Antifederalists and the Ratification Struggle of 1787–1788 (Norman, Okla., 1965), 17–19. 40. Jensen, Documentary History, 3: 51; Solberg. Federal Convention, 62. 41. Jensen, Documentary History, 3: 53–55, 57. Contemporary printed copies of the minutes of the two houses of the General Assembly are rare. The proceedings of the upper house, the Legislative Council, were reprinted in 1886 in Dover as the Minutes of the Council of the Delaware State (with a short supplement of corrections and additions in 1928). The minutes of the lower house, the House of Assembly, 1781–1792, are expected to be reprinted soon to complement the 1986 edition of those minutes from 1770 to 1781. An article in this issue by Harold Hancock discusses the minutes of the privy council. 42. For a full account of the Sussex election disputes see the article by John R. Kern in this issue. 43. [Tilton], Biographical History of Dionysius, 50. Cf. article by Kern in this issue 44. [Tilton]. Biographical History of Dionysius, 52. 45. Ibid., 53; Jensen, Documentary History, 3: 106–8. 46. Jensen, Documentary History, 3: 108–11. There is an analysis of the composition of the ratifying convention in Forrest McDonald, We The People, 120–23. McDonald finds that the majority of the members were small farmers, as was probably the usual case with Delaware legislative bodies in the eighteenth century. 47. Jensen, Documentary History, 3: 94. 48. Flower, John Dickinson, 250. Dickinson did accept some positions within the state in the next few years. Ibid., 253, 254, 261.

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16 A Parson in Politics: The Expulsion of John C. Brush from the Delaware General Assembly in 1801 With this essay I returned, to the joys of discovery. A sentence in J. Thomas Scharf ’s remarkable History of Delaware (2 volumes, Philadelphia, 1888) called my attention to the strange case of the expulsion of John C. Brush from the Delaware legislature on the grounds of being an ordained minister. I enjoyed studying this event and writing the following article, which appeared in Delaware History, vol. 23 (1989), pages 300–312. I examined the practice of barring ministers from legislative service as it developed in England and was transplanted to the colonies in America, where it was retained in a few states, in some cases as a defense against liberal reformers among the clergy. An article I wrote on the larger topic remained unpublished when I ran out of enthusiasm for the topic and of the physical agility to reexamine the sources.

IN JANUARY 1801 THERE OCCURRED A UNIQUE EVENT IN THE HISTORY OF the General Assembly of Delaware: the assemblymen exercised their right to expel an elected delegate on the grounds that he was constitutionally disqualified. Not in one case only, but in two, for each house expelled a member: John Bird from the state senate and John C. Brush from the House of Representatives. The case of John Bird will not be dealt with here. It is not very interesting, perhaps because so little is known about it. Bird was expelled because, as the charge declared, he ‘‘hath been and still is concerned in certain navy contracts,’’ which disqualified him according to Article II, Section 12, of the constitution of 1792.1 Bird, a ship chandler in New Castle with a warehouse on the river shore, seems to have acknowledged his culpability.2 Apparently he 268

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made no protest when the state senate declared his seat vacant on January 14. At a new election, held on January 21, Robert Maxwell was chosen to Bird’s place. Perhaps Bird then shifted responsibility for his navy contracts to his partner, James Riddle. Such contracts would be important in a river town sustained by maritime commerce. At any rate, in October 1801 John Bird was again the nominee of his party for the state senate. He won the election, and this time no objection was raised. He served out his three-year term, and at its conclusion became a member of the House of Representatives, where he served, being reelected annually, until his death in 1810.3 John C. Brush was a different case. He contested his expulsion vigorously. He left, as Bird did not, a written record of his opinion on various subjects. And the constitutional provision on the basis of which he was expelled from the House of Representatives has itself an interesting history. The provision, found in article VIII, section 9, of the state constitution of 1792, reads as follows: ‘‘No clergyman or preacher of the gospel, of any denomination, shall be capable of holding any civil office in this State, or of being a member of either branch of the legislature, while he continues in the exercise of the pastoral or clerical functions.’’ Behind those words lay a long history. By an unwritten rule clergymen were disqualified from membership in the colonial assembly of the Lower Counties as they were from the lower house of assembly in each of the other British colonies.4 The custom of disqualifying clergymen arose not out of any conflict with the church but because the colonies mimicked the mother country. Though in England the higher clergy sat in the House of Lords, clergymen were ineligible for service in the House of Commons. The Commons, in origin, was called mainly to approve a tax to support the monarch’s needs. For several centuries before the settlement of America, the lower clergy met only in a convocation, an assembly of their own, to approve a tax on themselves. After the seventeenth century the convocation ceased to meet, but clergymen still were ineligible for seats in the Commons, a service they were glad to escape in the early years at least.5 Occasionally, but rarely, there were challenges to this unwritten rule in America. Occasionally, but rarely, a clergyman served as an elected representative. The Reverend Ebenezer Devotion did so in

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Connecticut in 1765 with no other known response than the remark of a fellow cleric that this was ‘‘a very singular Instance.’’6 In Delaware, John Haslet, who had been ordained a Presbyterian minister in Ireland, won election to five of the last six assemblies before independence. But unlike Devotion, Haslet had no pastoral charge when elected and, as far as is known, never had served in a clerical capacity after coming to America.7 In some states the Revolution changed the custom of barring ministers from the legislature. In preparing state constitutions, New Hampshire and Massachusetts did not choose to disqualify clergymen, probably because of the vigorous part ministers of the dominant Congregational churches played during the years of turmoil.8 Likewise, Pennsylvania and New Jersey admitted clergymen to a political role they had not previously played, possibly because of the activities of such clergymen as the Muhlenbergs in one state and John Witherspoon in the other.9 But seven of the thirteen colonies continued in their new state constitutions to ban clergymen from their legislatures. New York and Delaware carried this disqualification farthest, barring ministers from all civil and military offices. South Carolina extended the ban to service in the privy council (as some other states did) and as governor or lieutenant governor.10 In most of those states the Anglican Church had been established before the Revolution. Inasmuch as a large number of the Anglican clergy had been loyalists, there was little incentive to open the legislatures to them. Delaware, however, had no established church. It seems probable that the clergy in Delaware were disqualified out of fear that some one or more of the Presbyterian ministers, Whigs to a man, would take a leading role in state politics. Thomas McKean thought his pastor in New Castle, Joseph Montgomery, was a particular target of this constitutional disqualification, and he sought, in vain, to prevent its adoption.11 The first constitution of Delaware was written in 1776. When a second Delaware constitution was written in 1791–1792, there was no change in the provision disqualifying clergymen from office. In that regard, however, one interesting passage occurred in the convention’s proceedings. In June 1792, just before adoption of the new constitution in its final form, the most distinguished member of the convention, John Dickinson, proposed a limitation on the disqualification of clergymen. He moved, seconded by Dr. George Monro,

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to delete that portion of the disqualification phrase that forbade clergymen from holding other ‘‘civil offices,’’ but not the provision banning their membership in the General Assembly. Dickinson’s motion, possibly grounded in his understanding of English precedents—and admiration of them—would have aligned the exclusionary rule in Delaware with that of most other states, as well as with colonial and English customs. The proposal was rejected, however, without a recorded vote.12 Such was the law, with the exclusionary provision very clear, when John C. Brush was elected to a seat in the Delaware House of Representatives in the fall of 1800. Clergymen were forbidden to be members of either legislative chamber or to hold any civil office. But the provision was not a complete exclusion. The disqualification was ameliorated by a concluding clause, ‘‘while he continues in the exercise of the pastoral or clerical functions.’’ On that provision John Conklin Brush staked his claim to a seat. He had been a clergyman, of that there was no doubt. Ordained a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1795, Brush had to be released from a pastoral charge with two Reformed congregations on Long Island (North and South Hampton) in 1796, when he accepted a call to the united Presbyterian congregations of Dover and Duck Creek. This call was not Brush’s first connection with Delaware, for he had taught in Dover at some time in the 1780s or early 1790s. Born in Huntington, Long Island, in 1763, Brush enlisted in the army as a teenager in 1780. Just after the war a John Brush, most likely he, was a member of the first elected delegation to the New York assembly from his home county, Suffolk, which had previously been under British control. That assembly met in the early months of 1784, when Brush was about twenty-one (his exact birthday is not known), but when a new election was held in the fall of that year, Brush was the only member of the Suffolk County delegation of five not chosen again. If this Assemblyman Brush was indeed our John C. Brush, he had probably begun a peregrinating career that we cannot follow until he returned to New York to enter the ministry.13 Even after his ordination it is hard to keep up with Brush. Probably he had left his charges in the Hamptons before his connection with them was officially terminated, for he was reported to be preaching near Philadelphia just before he came to Delaware. His congregations in Pennsylvania were said to be composed primarily of young Germans whose parents wished ‘‘their Children to be En-

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glished’’ and who were heartbroken at his leaving them. The witness to his work in Pennsylvania was a mature woman of some literary distinction. Attending Brush’s church only because no Episcopal services were available, she found him ‘‘a rational Devout preacher’’ who seemed ‘‘to have vital Religion much at heart.’’14 Apparently John Brush had been a well-regarded teacher, too, when he was previously in Dover, though the local Presbyterians were so hard put to fill their pulpit that they could hardly be very demanding. John Miller, their first pastor, had also come from the North and from a related denomination (he was a New England Congregationalist by origin), but after his death his long tenure had been succeeded by only short-term pastorates.15 A romantic attachment might have encouraged John Brush to accept the call to Delaware, for he was married soon after his arrival. Except that his bride was named Ann and had at least one friend (and former schoolmate) who came to attend the wedding, we know nothing of her.16 In 1796, the year of his coming to Delaware, Brush was dismissed, at his request, from the Classis of New Brunswick, a governing body (similar to a presbytery) of the Reformed Church, on the understanding that he was transferring to the Presbytery of Lewes, which had jurisdiction over his new charges.17 For reasons not entirely clear, beyond the fact that a scheduled semiannual meeting was not held in the fall of 1797, Brush’s application to the presbytery was delayed. Quite possibly Brush put off his application because he found his faith in orthodox Christianity weakening. In March 1798 he took a step that changed the course of his life. On the 24th of that month he wrote to the presbytery to declare he could not subscribe to the basic Presbyterian credo, the Westminster Confession. He had concluded, he avowed, that ‘‘the present generally received system of religious opinions’’ was ‘‘the greatest corruption of the christian religion, if candidly and impartially examined . . . with a clear and unbiased understanding.’’ Though he had kept his opinions secret from his congregation, he was now of sentiments corresponding to those of Dr. Joseph Priestley, the distinguished English scientist and unitarian, who had recently fled England for the United States because of his unorthodox opinions in politics and religion. In other words, Brush now rejected belief in the Trinity and in the orthodox view of the divinity of Christ.18 The presbytery did not act hastily, but in September they in-

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formed Brush’s two congregations that in view of their pastor’s opinions he should no longer be permitted to preach to them. So instructed, the congregations set up a joint committee that met with Brush and agreed, by mutual consent, on the termination of his pastoral service.19 The damage this episode caused to the Presbyterian church at Dover was lasting. Some of the members became Methodists; others merely lost their enthusiasm. The church was not revived until 1818.20 The damage to Brush’s career was lasting too. In Delaware, at least, he never resumed any ministerial duties. In January 1798 he had purchased a three hundred-acre farm in Appoquinimink Hundred, New Castle County, and this farm may have been his sole resource in the next two years. It proved a weak resource, however, for in 1800 he mortgaged it to Dr. William McKee, who was to gain clear title in five years if the mortgage was not then paid off.21 Hoping for a new source of income in this period when his ministerial career had come to an end, Brush sought a political post. Informed that the state auditor was about to resign, he applied to Governor Richard Bassett for the appointment. The period 1798– 1799 was the heart of an anti-French hysteria, a time when a naval war was under way with the French and when an inflamed Federalist Congress had passed Alien and Sedition Acts that represented their fear of French influence. Governor Bassett was a Federalist, and he and his advisers were likely to be suspicious of Presbyterians, who traditionally were the basic element in Delaware of the opposition party, the Democratic-Republicans. To a Federalist, the one thing worse than a Presbyterian was a freethinker, as unitarians were assumed to be. Bassett was a Federalist with a difference, for he was a devout convert to Methodism and sympathetic to many social reforms, such as the emancipation of slaves. But he could not sympathize with a unitarian. If Brush’s appeal for a political office was ill-timed, so was his venture into public controversy. In September 1799 a Kent County handbill charged Brush with seditious libel against the government of the United States (under the Alien and Sedition Laws). Brush was said to have declared that the federal government’s expenditures in raising an army for a possible war with France would cost taxpayers of Delaware $45,000 a year, a large sum then. Brush did not admit responsibility for the claim, but he defended it.22 In defending himself, Brush placed the responsibility for this and

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other attacks on his reputation (such as the charge that he was an ‘‘infidel’’) upon Attorney-General Nicholas Ridgely. He boldly attacked Ridgely, a power in the Federalist party, through the columns of the Democratic-Republican paper, the Wilmington Mirror of the Times, beginning on September 17, 1800. Brush was obviously embarrassed that his application to the Federalist governor for a political office had been made known. He had made the application, he explained, only at the urging of his wife. (She must have been distraught—and with reason—by worry over the family’s prospects.) It sullied his reputation ‘‘as a republican.’’23 His reputation as a republican was important to Brush in the fall of 1800. Rejected rudely by the Federalists, with whom his wife apparently had connections, Brush sought reestablishment of his good name, if not of his fortune, by active participation in the politics of the opposition party, the Jeffersonian party, the party where his true sympathies lay. He was accorded a place on the ticket as a candidate for the state house of representatives from New Castle County, the site of his farm.24 Apparently a question was raised about his eligibility. Brush responded in a letter of September 24 (printed on October 1) to the editor of the Mirror. He noted that the constitution disqualified a clergyman from office only ‘‘while he continues in the exercise of his pastoral or clerical functions.’’ ‘‘I have,’’ he avowed, ‘‘long since discontinued the exercise’’ of such functions, and during this time ‘‘I have refused all applications to preach, to baptize and to marry.’’ ‘‘Of course,’’ he added, ‘‘I no longer consider myself as sustaining the character of a preacher of the gospel.’’ In the critical election of 1800, when Vice-President Thomas Jefferson defeated incumbent President John Adams, the DemocraticRepublicans, as usual, carried New Castle County, electing to the House of Representatives all seven of their candidates. Brush stood sixth among the candidates (they ran at large, not by district) when the votes were tallied. Also as usual, the Federalists carried Kent and Sussex counties. One of the members from Kent County was Nicholas Ridgely.25 Brush—like John Bird, who was elected to the state senate—was present for a brief meeting of the legislature, November 3–5. The legislature had been called to choose presidential electors, which the Federalists opted to do through the legislature rather than by popular vote. Hopeless though their course was in a legislature where they were in a minority, the Democratic-Republicans, in joint

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session, nominated their own candidates for elector—John Dickinson, John Patten, and David Hall—all stalwart Jeffersonians. It was Brush who nominated Patten, a former army officer who had served in Congress.26 The legislature accomplished no other business before it adjourned to the first Tuesday in January. But it did set up committees to review the recent elections and ‘‘the qualifications of the members.’’27 The result of that review has already been reported. On January 8, Outerbridge Horsey, a future United States senator, reported for the house committee that they found John C. Brush, ‘‘not duly qualified to be a member of their house.’’28 Horsey’s report came to the floor on January 13, when Brush was given permission to speak on his own behalf or through counsel. He chose the latter, probably on the advice of his colleagues, and he made a rather strange choice as his advocate—John Vining, a Dover attorney, who was a Federalist state senator and had been a United States representative and senator. He was also a notorious spendthrift, and perhaps the Democratic-Republicans hoped that Vining’s fabled glibness and his pecuniary needs would save Brush from the ire of such another of Dover’s lawyers as Nicholas Ridgely. If that was the plan, it did not work. Vining argued in the house on Brush’s behalf over part of two days, but in the end the case for Brush was lost on a party vote.29 Vining, who was not known for working hard anyway, had been given little time to prepare his case. Three days before the case was to be argued Brush declared he refused to employ any counsel because he counted on the aid of his assembly colleague Caesar Augustus Rodney.30 Rodney was an outstanding attorney; he was shortly to be appointed attorney general of the United States. He was also the leader of Brush’s party. However, he was detained in Wilmington and did not reach Dover until the last minute.31 Thus the dependence on Vining, whose efforts on Brush’s behalf were unsuccessful. A new election was called to fill Brush’s seat in the house and John Bird’s seat in the senate. After many informal consultations the Democratic-Republicans decided to stand by Brush but to substitute another candidate for Bird, confessing his ineligibility. The problem now was to get the voters to turn out at a special election on very short notice.32 The expulsion was voted on January 14, and the clerk was ordered to command the New Castle County sheriff to hold a new election in exactly one week, on January 21 (a Wednesday). Since the only

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polling place would be at the courthouse at New Castle, party leaders had to work fast to rally the faithful. Needless to say, they had no radio or telephone to use to notify voters. And the voters had no automobiles to expedite a trip to New Castle on a midweek workday. But the party machine came through in the crisis. Brush was reelected, though Bird was abandoned—for the time being.33 The Democratic-Republican party organ in Wilmington, the Mirror of the Times, was probably a strong bulwark to the party machine. A semiweekly, it had just time to get out two calls to party members. The first, dated January 17, admitted the decision about Bird ‘‘is probably right,’’ but Brush’s expulsion ‘‘appears an arbitrary and unprecedented act, . . . an emanation of that spirit of party violence, which sticks at no means, however unjust and illegal, to attain any desired object.’’ The second, on the day of election, January 21, blamed Brush’s expulsion on the intrigues of a power-mad ‘‘Kent County Dictator’’—undoubtedly meaning Nicholas Ridgely. ‘‘Don’t be slaves!’’ advised a correspondent who called himself simply ‘‘Citizen of Newcastle County.’’ ‘‘Go to New Castle, one and all, and vote for Brush!’’ Fortunately for Brush, it was as difficult for the Federalists to get voters to New Castle for a special election as it was for the Democratic-Republicans. Brush got eight hundred less votes than in October, but he still defeated his Federalist opponent, Nicholas Van Dyke, by 316 to 103. (In October Brush had 1,133 votes, and the leading Federalist candidate had 916.) Van Dyke, a future United States senator, lived in New Castle and possibly could rally more local supporters than Brush, whose farm was at the southern end of the county. But the Democratic-Republicans had the better machine and the stronger base among the voters of New Castle County. They not only reelected Brush, but they put their candidate Robert Maxwell in Bird’s senate seat (by 305 votes over his opponent’s 103), even though a few days earlier the Mirror had thought its party was nominating someone else.34 The reelection of Brush seemed to take the wind out of the Federalists’ sails. It was inconsistent, as the Mirror pointed out on January 24, to denounce him, as at least one Federalist had done, for forsaking his calling, and then to expel him from the legislature for not having done so. Or possibly the fact that Caesar Augustus Rodney, the paladin of his party, was now in Dover to defend Brush made the difference. On Monday, January 26, 1801, five days after Brush’s reelection,

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Outerbridge Horsey once again reported for the elections committee of the House of Representatives, and this time the report supported Brush. The lengthy report incorporated a string of whereases, which included some further proofs of Brush’s eligibility. For instance, under date of January 20, the moderator of the Reformed Classis of New Brunswick reported that Brush had requested leave to resign the ministerial office but was refused because he had been dismissed by the Classis in 1796 to join the Presbytery of Lewes. And Brush could not resign from the Presbytery of Lewes, because that body had never admitted him. Brush was embroiled in what the late twentieth century would call a ‘‘Catch 22’’ situation. The Horsey committee found its way out of a dilemma by getting Brush to sign a statement that is still to be found among the Legislative Papers in the State Archives: I, John C. Brush, of New Castle County, in the State of Delaware, do hereby acknowledge the publication in the Mirror, one of the publick News papers of this State, dated 24. Sep. 1800, and signed John C. Brush. –And that the said publication was designed and intended a full and absolute resignation of all my Ministerial powers, either clerical or pastoral.35

The last ‘‘whereas’’ in Horsey’s report noted that, as the foregoing statement indicated, Brush ‘‘utterly disclaimed’’ the right of exercising any clerical function, ‘‘contrary to the verbal statement formerly made to the committee without reflection, as is now alleged by Mr. Brush,’’ all of which suggests that Brush had said something unwise at his previous examination. Consequently, the report concluded, ‘‘they believe him entitled to hold his seat in the house.’’36 So the expulsion case terminated in Brush’s favor. It was the high mark of his political career, and almost its end. So far as is known, nothing went particularly well for him thereafter. His party did not renominate him for the house of representatives in the fall of 1801. He remained true to his party nonetheless, for in October 1802 he wrote Caesar A. Rodney from Duck Creek, assuring him of the pleasure ‘‘your republican friends here feel’’ at news of Rodney’s election to Congress. But he was troubled now by some unexplained law suit, perhaps over his land or his debts, that had been, in his words, ‘‘so long pending’’ that it worried him more than it ever had previously. He hoped Rodney could bring it to a quick decision, or ‘‘I must suffer much.’’37

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Though no more is known of the suit, things did not go well for Brush. He lost his farm in 1805, when he was unable to pay off his debt to Dr. McKee. In that year McKee’s wife told a friend that she pitied Mrs. Brush, who bore her trials with dignity. Brush himself, in February 1805, was seeking a place in ‘‘some of the back settlements,’’ but the doctor’s wife feared he would do well nowhere.38 Having lost his land, Brush moved in 1805 to Green Island, near Troy, New York, where he farmed for several years. By 1820 he had moved to Washington, where he published a booklet comparing wheat culture in the north with the same enterprise in the South.39 His comparison was drawn from his experiences as a wheat farmer in upstate New York and at Duck Creek, in Delaware, and the contrast he made was favorable to Delaware. In the introduction to his pamphlet, Brush spoke of ‘‘the very low and exhausted state of [his] body and mind.’’ Though he was ‘‘tired of preaching’’ he declared he owed this last lesson to the farmers of his native state.40 At that time, in 1820, he filed a pension application with the federal government, claiming he had been living off the good will of friends for years and had no property except two patents, one for a fireplace improvement and the other for a cylindrical nail-cutting machine. (It was then necessary to demonstrate need to qualify for a pension.) In the application he gave his middle name as Cicero, instead of Conklin (perhaps an indication of his scholarly pretensions), and his wife’s name as Mary. Since his first wife was named Ann, Mary, who survived him, was probably a second wife. Two years later, on April 8, 1822, Brush died in Washington at the age of fifty-nine.41 The constitutional provision that had given excuse for his expulsion from the legislature of Delaware in 1801 survived Brush by many years. When a third state constitution was presented to the people in 1832, the old disqualification was retained, with only one modest change: the insertion of the word ‘‘ordained’’ before ‘‘minister’’ and ‘‘preacher.’’ Judge Willard Hall procured this emendation, pointing out that some Methodists who preached occasionally but were not ordained, had no congregations, and received no stipends were excluded from office to the public’s loss. He knew one member of the convention who fell into that class and had been refused appointment as a justice of the peace. Hall’s motion ran into opposition, but it carried narrowly, by a vote of fourteen to twelve. Joseph Maull may have voiced the opinion of many delegates when

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he declared, ‘‘A clergyman is a politician for heaven and ought to have nothing to do with our state affairs.’’42 When another constitutional convention met in 1852–53 some sentiment appeared for deleting the provision, but the discussion took place in committee and was not recorded. In the end the provision was retained, with very minor verbal alteration that was meaningless since the work of the convention was rejected by the electorate.43 In 1897 the provision disqualifying clergy was at last dropped from Delaware’s constitution, but not without a fight to retain it. William Cooch, Woodburn Martin, Ezekiel Cooper, and Wilson Cavender vigorously defended the ancient disqualification. The essence of their argument was that ministers could be contaminated by politics, that religion and state affairs should not be mixed.44 Martin Bates opposed them vehemently, declaring ‘‘I do not believe in the old defunct, decayed, dead and buried doctrine that because a man gets into religion, he necessarily must become civilly dead.’’ William Spruance was more moderate in his expression and possibly more persuasive. He confessed that ministers in politics had once posed a danger to the state, as, for instance, in England when the church owned a large part of the land, or in Mexico, and he noted that English bishops still sat in the House of Lords. But ‘‘the clergymen and the priests,’’ he argued, ‘‘are not in our day—and are not likely to be in any future day under our system of government—a dangerous element.’’ To him it was contrary to the spirit of our institutions ‘‘to put a ban on holding office on any class of citizens unless they’ve proved themselves unfit’’—as in the case of felons.45 Spruance argued that if political life interfered with a minister’s effectiveness in his church, as Cooch and others claimed it did, this was strictly a matter between the minister and his congregation. Other convention delegates rallied to that theme. It was also noted that expunging the provision disqualifying ministers from office would bring the constitution of Delaware into conformity with the national constitution. And so the expungers had their way, thirteen to nine, in a vote on which yeas and nays were recorded at William Cooch’s request.46 In the course of the debate, a delegate asked how many other states had such a provision in their constitution, and William Saulsbury answered boldly, ‘‘Not one.’’47 He was wrong. After Delaware dropped the disqualifying provision from its constitution, there

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were still two states that clung to it, Maryland and Tennessee. And in those two states the provision remained in effect until the latter half of the twentieth century. In the course of the debate at Dover in 1897, delegates often turned to history to bolster their arguments. For instance, Dr. Nathan Pratt, of Milford, boasted, erroneously, of the service of Parson Sydenham Thorne in the legislative council of the Revolutionary era. Charles F. Richards told of a retired Presbyterian minister in Laurel, who might have served his state with distinction had be not been disqualified by his calling. But no one in the convention remembered the case of the one preacher who had been expelled from the legislature—the case of poor John Brush, soldier, teacher, author, inventor, theologian, and, briefly, politician.48

Notes 1. Senate Journal, Jan. 13, 14, 23, 1801. 2. The Collected Essays of Richard S. Rodney on Early Delaware (Wilmington, 1979), 220; Federal Writers’ Project, New Castle on the Delaware, rev. ed., by Anthony Higgins (New Castle, 1973), 101. 3. Senate Journal, Jan. 7, 1802; J. Thomas Scharf, History of Delaware, 1605–1888, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1888), 1:406; and House Journal for the years 1805–9. The provision disqualifying army and navy contractors remained in all of Delaware constitutions including the latest, that of 1897, but apparently it was never utilized again. 4. The author believes that the disqualification applied in the island colonies as well as on the American continent, but he has not yet checked the legislative history of the islands. 5. R. K. MacKenzie, The English Parliament (Baltimore, 1963), 18–19; G. Barnett Smith, History of the English Parliament (London, 1892), 1:156; William Blackstone, Commentaries, 16th ed. (London, 1825), 1:174–75, 376. 6. Mark A. Noll, ‘‘Ebenezer Devotion,’’ Church History 45 (1976):304–6. 7. Ernest Moyne, ‘‘Who Was John Haslet of Delaware?’’ Delaware History 13 (1969):287, 290; Claudia L. Bushman, Harold B. Hancock, and Elizabeth Moyne Homsey, eds., Proceedings of the Assembly of the Lower Counties on Delaware . . . (Newark, 1986), 572. 8. Alice Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution (Durham, 1928), 134–35, 183–89. Connecticut and Rhode Island did not write state constitutions until the nineteenth century. 9. Witherspoon had strong opinions on this subject (Anson P. Stokes, Church and State in the United States [New York, 1950], 1:624–25). 10. Francis N. Thorpe, The Federal and State Constitution, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws . . . (Washington, 1909), 5:2637 and 6:3253. 11. G. S. Rowe, Thomas McKean, The Shaping of an American Republicanism (Boul-

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der, 1978), 91; Proceedings of the Convention of the Delaware State, . . . 1776, reprint ed. (Wilmington, 1927), 25. Montgomery did become a legislator in Pennsylvania. 12. Dickinson had served as president of the convention until May 30, when he resigned that office because of his health (Minutes of the Convention of the Delaware State at Dover, 1791–1792 [Wilmington, 1792], 67, 102). Like Dickinson, Dr. Monro had studied in Great Britain and therefore was probably acquainted with British practice. More importantly, he was a Presbyterian and inasmuch as Dickinson was increasingly allied to the Presbyterian faction in Delaware politics their motion may have been intended to modify the anti-Presbyterian bias that Thomas McKean had noted in the exclusionary principle when it was adopted in 1776. On the politics of the 1790s, see John A. Munroe, Federalist Delaware, 1775–1815, reprint ed. (Newark, 1987), passim. The minutes of the second constitutional convention have recently been reprinted, pp. 777–913, in Claudia L. Bushman, Harold B. Hancock, and Elizabeth Moyne Homsey, eds, Proceedings of the House of Assembly of the Delaware State, 1781–1792, and of the Constitutional Convention of 1792 (Newark, 1988). 13. Conklin Mann, ‘‘Thomas and Richard Brush, of Huntington, Long Island,’’ New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 67 (1936): 329; Stuart C. Brush, with Russell B. Brush, The Descendants of Thomas and Richard Brush of Huntington, Long Island (Baltimore, 1982), 84; Ann Ridgley to Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson, May 7, 1796, in Leon de Valinger and Virginia Shaw, eds., A Calendar of Ridgely Family Letters in the Delaware State Archives (Dover, 1948), 1:147–48; Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790 (Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 99th series, part 2 [Baltimore, 1981]), 320–21. During Brush’s brief service in the New York legislature a question arose, by strange coincidence, regarding the eligibility of a Baptist minister, Ephraim Payne. Brush voted, in the minority, to expel Payne (New York Assembly Journal, Mar. 4–5, 1784). 14. Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson to Ann Moore Ridgely, Apr. 27, 1796, Ridgely Collection, folder 169, Delaware State Archives, Dover (hereafter DSA). 15. Ann Moore Ridgely to Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson, May 7, 1796, Ridgely Collection, folder 94, DSA; Henry C. Conrad, History of the State of Delaware (Wilmington 1908), 11:604. 16. Elizabeth Ferguson to Ann Ridgely, Apr. 27, 1796, Ridgely Collection, folder 169, DSA. The Ridgely correspondence may be conveniently examined in Leon de Valinger, Jr., and Virginia F. Shaw, eds., A Calendar of Ridgely Family Letters, 1742– 1899, in the Delaware State Archives, 1, where this letter is summarized on p. 147. 17. House Journal, Jan. 26, 1801. 18. Brush’s letter to the presbytery is published in the appendix, pages 118–21, to the House Journal for 1801. 19. House Journal, Jan. 26, 1801. The action of the presbytery is detailed in the appendix, pp. 118–21. 20. ‘‘Memoir of Mrs. Leah W. Morris,’’ Christian Advocate (Philadelphia) 4 (1826): 551; Aline Noren Ehinger, Bridge Across the Years (1975), 91–92. 21. New Castle County deed book R2, p. 304; U2, p. 69. 22. Mirror of the Times, Sept. 20, 1800. 23. Ibid., Oct. 4, 1800. 24. Ibid., Oct. 1, 1800. 25. Ibid., Oct. 11, 1800; Wilmington Monitor, Sept. 20, 1800; House Journal, Nov. 3, 1800.

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26. Senate Journal, Nov. 5, 1800. 27. House Journal, Nov. 5, 1800. 28. Ibid., Jan. 8, 1801. 29. Ibid., Jan. 13–14, 1801. 30. John C. Brush to Caesar A. Rodney, Jan. 10, 1801, Brown Collection, box 23, folder 5, Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington (hereafter HSD). 31. House Journal, Jan. 13, 1801. 32. Nehemiah Tilton to C. A. Rodney, Jan. 18, 1801, Nehemiah Tilton Papers, HSD. 33. House Journal, Jan. 22, 1801; Senate Journal, Jan. 23, 1801. 34. Mirror, Oct. 11, 1800; Jan. 24, 1801. 35. Legislative Papers, Record Group 1111, folder ‘‘1801, Legislative, Miscellaneous,’’ DSA. 36. House Journal, Jan. 26, 1801. 37. Brush to Rodney, Oct. 11, 1802. Rodney Collection, box 4, folder 11, HSD. 38. William McKee to Henry M. Ridgely, Mar. 4 and 17, 1805 and Elizabeth McKee to Sally Ridgely, Feb. 17, 1805, in Calendar of Ridgely Family Letters, 2:111, 112. 39. A Small Tract Entitled a Candid and Impartial Exposition of . . . Opinions of the Comparative Quality of the Wheat and Flour in the Northern and Southern Sections of the United States (Washington, 1820). 40. Ibid., 3, 11. 41. Veteran’s pension claim 35789, Jan. 13, 1820, National Archives, Washington; Conklin Mann, ‘‘Thomas and Richard Brush of Huntington, Long Island,’’ 329. The application is partly illegible. 42. William M. Gouge, ed., Debates in the Delaware Convention for Revising the Constitution . . . Held at Dover, November 1831 (Wilmington, 1881), 201, 203. 43. Journal of the Convention of the People of the State of Delaware [beginning] on the Seventh and Eighth of December, 1852 (Wilmington, 1853), 73–74, 119, 132–33, 193. 44. Charles G. Guyer and Edmond C. Hardesty, eds., Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Delaware, . . . Commencing December 1, 1896 (Milford, 1958), 5:3200–3202, 3215–24. 45. Ibid., 5:3215, 3216–17. 46. Ibid., 5:3217–19. 47. Ibid., 5:3222. 48. Ibid., 5:3219–20, 3222. Only J. Thomas Scharf, or whoever wrote this section of his mammoth book, remembered. See his History of Delaware, 1:408n.

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17 Three Nineteenth-Century Immigrants Of several articles I wrote about my ancestors, articles that were passed to my children and a few old friends in typescript, one called ‘‘The Dettlings in My Past,’’ related some tales that might interest many people. These tales are of the adventures of two young women who left Germany as teenagers in a daring move to America. Since most Delawareans are descended from immigrants, I think I should grant some space to the immigrant experience. And why not tell of a grandmother and great-grandmother, unrelated except by marriage, who shared some of the triumphs and the heartaches that affected other newcomers to this land. One man, my great-grandfather also receives some attention, for he preceded the ladies. This account, recast and shortened from the version sent to my children, has never been previously published in any form. I have also written an account of my Irish forebears, ‘‘The Munroes of Galway and Delaware’’ that I circulated in my family but never published.

MY FIRST ANCESTOR IN AMERICA WAS ANDREAS DETTLING, MY GREATgrandfather, who arrived here in 1853 at about the age of twentyfive. He was six feet two inches tall (exactly my height at that age), with brown hair and regular features. Andreas had been born in the village of Dettlingen (the accent is on the middle syllable) in the principality of Hohenzollern Sigmaringen, a detached part of the Kingdom of Prussia. The village lies in beautiful hilly country on the eastern side of the Schwarzwald (the Black Forest), a low range of wooded hills that form the boundary between Baden (on the west) and Wu¨ rttemburg in Germany. Though politically united to Prussia in 1853, the people of Hohenzollern Sigmaringen, including the villagers of Dettlingen at the principality’s western extremity, were not Prussians, but Swabians, for this area, like most of Wu¨ rttemburg, which almost entirely surrounds it, was part of the ancient Duchy of Swabia, home, I believe, of descendants of the barbarians Julius Caesar called the Suevi. 283

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My old colleague, Walther Kirchner, a native of Berlin, prepared me for my visit to my great-grandfather’s town by explaining that Swabians were considered a jolly, backward sort—rather like American hillbillies, he said—worth a chuckle to more sophisticated Germans, but well-liked all the same. ‘‘If people learn you are Swabian,’’ he explained, ‘‘they’ll smile. But don’t be concerned, they’ll like you. Now, I’m a Prussian. Nobody likes me.’’ These comments helped me in 1962 when I visited Stuttgart, the thriving capital of Wu¨ rttemburg, during my first trip to Europe. One window of a bookstore near my hotel was filled with copies of a book bearing a title that would otherwise have been an enigma to me. It was Die Schwaben Sind Auch Menschen (Swabians Are People Too). One day earlier, when in Dettlingen, I had felt the force of Kirchner’s comment about the backwardness of the Swabians. The town lay at the end of a paved secondary road, seven miles off the main highway. There were about thirty houses, a compost heap in the front of each one. To reach the inn or gasthaus, we climbed to a second floor, the first or ground floor apparently being used as a stable or workshop. We found the host to be a stout, clownish fellow whose trousers were held up by a string or cord instead of a belt. He knew no English and his dialectic German was beyond my meager knowledge of his language. Fortunately a boy was there, presumably his son, not very clean but intelligent and with some knowledge of English. Through the boy we tried to place an order for some lunch, but all the proprietor had to offer was a string of wurst, so shriveled and unappealing that we decided to be satisfied with some beer. It came in reusable bottles with old-fashioned ceramic stoppers held on by wires. Though the facades of the houses were decorated by window boxes with flowers, their attractiveness was spoiled by the utilitarian compost heaps, from which the residents, probably mostly farmers, could load their carts as they trudged out to their fields in the morning. I saw few people in my brief stop at Dettlingen, but later on the same trip when I visited Sindringen, another community, I saw people—practically all women—trudging beside their carts to and from their fields at noon time. Here beside the Kocher River, in a section of Wu¨ rttemburg, northeast of Stuttgart, the countryside was beautiful and hilly, as around Dettlingen, but women were living in a socio-

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economic world that was at least a century behind the stylish urban mode of life in Stuttgart. I was very glad that three of my ancestors had left these towns where they might have been very comfortable but where opportunities for advancement, particularly in any intellectual field, seemed very scant. (I had a similar feeling when I visited the Irish village that my father’s family came from.) It seems clear that Andreas Dettling began his travels in 1846, when he made his first entries in a wanderbuch that I have inherited. According to a travel permit issued to him in Glatt in that year he was sixteen and a carpenter by trade. In 1846–1847 and again in 1850–1852 his wanderbuch is stamped by authorities at many locations in Germany and Switzerland—at Zurich, St. Gallen, Konstanz, Sigmaringen, Friedrichshafen, and Winterthur, among those that can be read clearly. In 1853 he received a passport allowing him to travel across France to Havre to take a ship to America. Why he settled in Delaware is not clear, but probably he had family connections. When he came to America in 1853 his notes show he was in New York briefly and at another time in Philadelphia and also in Schuylhill Haven, Pennsylvania. Apparently he moved around where he could find work as a carpenter. At some time he was in Salem, New Jersey, but he may have been in Delaware as early as April 30, 1853, when he began recording payments received from a man named Paullin and recording expenditures for board and laundry to someone named M. Benson. Soon he is keeping his notes in English, which he is struggling to learn. Through a number of pages he has written vocabulary lists, and on one page he copied the Lord’s Prayer in English. On April 26, 1854, he was in Dover, where he appeared before the Kent County prothonotary to register his intention of becoming an American citizen. He completed the citizenship process on September 14, 1858, when he appeared in Wilmington before Leonard Wales, clerk of the United States district court. There Christian Knauch testified on Andreas’s behalf that he had resided for at least one year in Delaware, and for five years in the United States. Finding he was of good moral character and receiving his promise to support the Constitution of the United States, the court issued the certificate of naturalization he sought. He had probably lived in Wilmington at least since 1857, when his name appeared in a city directory as a resident at the boarding house of Sarah Zourns. Presumably he was married soon after information was compiled for this directory since his son, a second Andrew (as the name now

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appeared) was born on March 24, 1859. This child became my grandfather. His mother was another immigrant, Wilhelmina Maier (or possibly Mayer), of whom more anon. I have few hints of what my great-grandfather was like. I know that he had some social instincts, for he became a charter member of a new lodge of Odd Fellows, the Herrmann Lodge, when it was established in June 1859. (Scharf, History of Delaware, 2, 823.) Like the name of the lodge (for an ancient German hero) the names of the other seven charter members—Greiner, Keinley, Krouch, Rehfuss, and Pretzscher among them—reflect a Germanic connection. My great-grandfather seems also to have been a Mason, for in a newspaper obituary his widow is said to have credited his Masonic brethren for coming to her aid at his death. (Wilmington Every Evening, June 25, 1900.) His social life was probably enlivened through these years by the presence in Wilmington of at least two of his sisters, Theresa Spiegelhalter and Agnes Seiller. They were his witnesses in 1863 when he was granted exemption from the Civil War draft as a married man aged thirty-five or more. I have no idea whether these sisters preceded or followed Andrew to Wilmington. Family lore has it that there were two other sisters in Wilmington but they were not on close terms with Andrew because they were Catholic, whereas he and Theresa and Agnes were not. Andrew and Wilhelmina, his wife, reared their children in the Lutheran church. The wife, my great-grandmother, arrived in America in 1854, traveling with an uncle from Ohio who had made out well in America and was visiting in Germany. Wilhelmina Maier was the daughter of Martin and Maria Margaretha Maier, who lived in Adelmannsfelden, today a pleasant small agricultural village with two inns and one church (Lutheran), set among the fertile rolling hills of the Hohenlohe, an area of Wu¨ rttemburg east of Stuttgart. Why she came to America is a mystery. Probably her father had died and the family, including two boys and one other girl, faced hard times. Her uncle paid her passage, but she was to repay him later and intended to go west with him. On the ship, however, she became friendly with a girl who was going to Philadelphia. This friend was met there by a relative and went into service in Bridgeton, New Jersey. To be near her, Wilhelmina took a job as a maid in Philadelphia and later came to Wilmington.

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Perhaps she came to Wilmington as a domestic servant, but her first job mentioned in family stories was in Stuck’s bakery, which later became Staib’s bakery, for after Mr. Stuck died his widow married Staib, who took over the business. Apparently the bakery served meals, for it is said that Wilhelmina met her future husband, Andrew Dettling, of Dettlingen, because he ate where she worked. This would not have been necessary to their becoming acquainted, since the Germans in Wilmington, or at least the Lutheran Germans, largely immigrants, formed a community. Their language and their religion distinguished them from other Wilmington residents, and by associating together they could enjoy the customs and the food and drink that had been part of their lives in the old world. Except for an Amish colony near Dover, established during the First World War, few descendants of the large number of German immigrants who had settled in neighboring Pennsylvania in colonial times had ever come to Delaware. The immigrants Wilhelmina Maier and Andrew Dettling had five children, including a one-year-old baby, before Andrew died at an early age (about forty-three) in June 1871. They owned a house (without indoor plumbing) at 211 Walnut Street and here Wilhelmina raised four children (one daughter died early) from the proceeds of a store she began with the help of an aforementioned raffle conducted by Andrew’s lodge brothers. At first the business of the store was listed in Wilmington directories as ‘‘varieties’’ but in 1881 it became ‘‘notions’’ and in a short time ‘‘groceries.’’ From the beginning Wilhelmina’s daughter Mary helped with the store and in its last years there was usually also a granddaughter helping after school and on Saturdays, as well as all day during vacations. Within the family the store was jokingly called ‘‘Wanamaker’s’’ after the large department store in Philadelphia because Wilhelmina would sell anything on which she might make a profit. Nothing was wasted. After an unwise investment in candy soldiers that did not sell, the family was required to use them in coffee in lieu of sugar until they were gone. All water had to be carried into the house from a pump outside. The day began at 4 a.m. when the bread man and the milk man had to be met. At ten Wilhelmina stopped work for a sandwich and a cup of coffee or, preferably, a glass of beer. The availability of beer depended on whether a child (my mother at one time) was available to be sent across the street to Feldmeier’s saloon with ten cents and

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a pail—a procedure called ‘‘rushing the duck’’—through a side door, not into the saloon proper. The ten cents would furnish beer enough not only for Wilhelmina but for any friend who might stop by. Beer, in the Dettling family, was regarded as a rather ordinary comestible. Not so whiskey or gin. These ‘‘hard’’ liquors were thought to be dangerous, almost evil. Money made in the liquor business does no one any good, said a family adage. Beer, however, was generally viewed differently. Wilhelmina kept busy. Every fall she made sauerkraut, which meant coring and trimming one thousand heads of cabbage. She also made ketchup, chow chow, pepper sauce, and preserves of all kinds. Something—apple butter, perhaps—was always on the stove, with pickled fish in the oven. Life in America was sufficiently good for Wilhelmina that she encouraged her widowed sister Dorothea to come to this country and to bring her five children. Having been forced by her situation to work in the fields, Dorothea was amenable to persuasion and, despite her mother’s worried attempts to dissuade her, undertook the long trip with her children—Katharine (aged sixteen), Frederick (fifteen), Bernard, George, and Jacob. Following their departure from Adelmannsfelden, Dorothea’s mother looked each day in the mail for word of the travelers, fearing some dreadful accident. Finally the postman delivered a letter from America announcing their safe arrival. The eighty-two-year-old woman (my great-great-grandmother) read it with such a spasm of relief that she cried out ‘‘Thank God,’’ and fell over dead. The Kleitz voyage must have occurred before 1883 because in that year Dorothea’s name (shortened to Dora) appears in the Wilmington directory. Wilhelmina met the immigrants (whose name was spelled Klaitz in Germany) in New York and guided them to their new home. I have heard how the excited Dettling children sat on their front steps waiting to meet their German cousins. The newcomers were heard before they were seen because they came down the street from the railroad depot with pots and pans rattling at their waists and carrying feather beds—five children preceded by their mother and their aunt. Wilhelmina had rented a house for them. It was in Spring Alley, around the corner from the Dettling home at 211 Walnut, and here they were installed after the excitement of the sisters’ reunion and the children’s becoming acquainted had quieted down.

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As she had come to the aid of her distressed sister, so Wilhelmina looked to the advancement of her own children. The elder son, Andrew (my grandfather) was trained as a machinist and won success in his short life, dying at thirty-nine as foreman in Slocomb’s shop. The younger son, Charles, became a draughtsman and worked at this trade until his retirement. One daughter, Katharine, probably married early and moved to Philadelphia, where she lived when I remember her, the mother of six children. The remaining daughter, Mary, helped run the store until she married when nearing forty. She had been sent to New Jersey, to learn to make funeral wreaths and may also have had some training as a milliner. But above all, she had an excellent head for business and was a wise advisor to her mother, to her husband (a very shrewd business man himself ), and to my mother, who was named for her and was almost treated as a daughter. With Wilhelmina and Mary in command, the business prospered to the point where Wilhelmina was able to buy the three-story brick house next to her little store. Before she moved into it, however, as was her plan, she died June 27, 1900, at sixty-four. Wilhelmina was buried from the new house, which had marked the achievements in the New World of a once lonely teenage immigrant. The story of another teenage immigrant, Wilhelmina’s daughterin-law and my grandmother is basically similar. Sophia Julia Hanselmann (usually called Sophie by friends) was born in Sindringen, in the Kingdom of Wu¨ rttemburg, on June 7, 1862, the daughter of Johan and Barbara Hanselmann. Johan was a carter, but he also owned a farm of about one hundred acres and a house in the town, which had once been walled, in a hilly area beside the Kocher River. Sindringen (sometimes spelled Su¨ ndringen) had been part of Wu¨ rttemburg only since 1806, when Napoleon reorganized the territories of the German states. Previously it was in the principality of Hohenlohe Bartenstein. Its residents, almost all Lutherans, spoke a Franconian dialect (not Swabian). Sophie’s mother died when the young woman was fourteen, and her father died about three years later. She then moved to Stuttgart, the capital of Wu¨ rttemburg, to live with a married sister, Kate Goetz. The oldest of her three brothers acquired the house in town, but from it or from the farm or both Sophie had a small inheritance, though it would not be hers to dispose of until she reached the age of maturity. The money became a bone of contention in the Goetz

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household for her brother-in-law, a tavern proprietor with political ambitions, wanted control of it. Reluctant to yield control and eager to find an escape from this embarrassment, Sophie seized an opportunity offered her of accompanying acquaintances to America in 1881. The acquaintances were an older couple, a Mr. and Mrs. Adam Wagner, from Ober Ohrn, a town near Sindringen. Newly married, they were traveling to visit Mrs. Wagner’s son from an earlier marriage who had settled a few years earlier in Wilmington, Delaware. On their way to America the two Wagners and Sophie ran into an even greater adventure than they anticipated. They sailed from Hamburg in northwest Germany on the Vandalia of the Hamburg-America Line. (In that year, according to the New York Times, July 19, 1881, 74,633 German emigrants passed through Hamburg en route to America before the end of June.) Disaster hit Sophie’s ship, the Vandalia, when its screw propeller ceased to function (‘‘broke its shaft’’ according to the New York Times of July 6). Unable to make any headway, the vessel lay at the mercy of the waves and the wind, driven this way and that, for over three weeks. The ship was sighted in the Atlantic northwest of Scotland on June 26, and two days later two tugs were sent out from the River Clyde, but their first searches were unsuccessful. The captain of one tug, giving up the mission, reported that ‘‘he met a heavy westerly gale and thick weather’’; even if he had found the ship he could not have towed her. Another tug was being sent out from Thurso on July 5, and the manager of the Hamburg-America line had gone to Glasgow, trying to get a large steamer to go out. The Admiralty had ordered a steamer then at Queenstown, in Ireland, to join the search. Meanwhile on the Vandalia affairs were becoming desperate. Food ran short, and fresh water was exhausted. The crew managed to distill some sea water, and finally after twenty-two days they were sighted thirteen miles off the Hebridean island of Lewis by a Scottish mailboat which towed the Vandalia to within four miles of Stornoway, the island’s chief port; from there tugs took the ship in tow to Glasgow for repairs (New York Times, July 9, 1881). Eventually, whether on another ship or on the repaired Vandalia is not clear, the Wagners and Sophie Hanselmann reached New York, and then by train, Wilmington. I have heard that Mrs. Wagner had it in mind that Sophie—was her inheritance thought of ?—would make a good wife for her bachelor son. But as she had demonstrated in the Goetz household in

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Stuttgart, Sophie had a mind of her own. After staying briefly with the Wagners, Sophie moved to the home of the Rollers, a German family who had a bakery in the area referred to as ‘‘over Third Street Bridge’’ or South Wilmington. Healthy, industrious young German girls were in demand for housework, and before long Sophie moved to the home of the Liebermans, on West Street, between Eighth and Ninth. The Liebermans, who owned a store at Sixth and Market, were one of the first prominent Jewish families in Wilmington. Somehow, probably through Zion Lutheran Church, which was a rallying place for Protestant Germans in Wilmington, she made the acquaintance of young Andrew Dettling, son of the immigrant. On November 26, 1884, when Sophie was twenty-two and the groom was twenty-five, they were married by Zion’s pastor, Dr. Paul Isenschmid. A learned and respected man who was also a doctor, he was nevertheless commonly referred to as ‘‘Poppy’’ Isenschmid, without, so far as I know, any wish to be disrespectful. A year after their marriage, Sophie and her husband bought a two-story brick house at 302 Lombard Street, not far from Wilhelmina’s little store but, in general, a better property, boasting indoor plumbing. For a young woman of twenty-three, a new bride, who had come almost alone to the New World, this was a promising beginning. There was, however, a $500 Wilmington Savings Fund Society mortgage on the house, which was probably bought with Sophie’s inheritance. Andrew Dettling was in no hurry to pay off the mortgage. In the following thirteen years of marriage he lived well in the style of a young German-American artisan of the late nineteenth century. He went out many nights by himself, my mother told me. Sometimes it was to a lodge like Delaware Tribe No. 1 of the Improved Order of Red Men, where he was ‘‘keeper of wampum’’ (treasurer) in 1887 (Scharf, History of Delaware, 2: 824). He also belonged to the Saengerbund (Singing Society), and my mother remembered him singing ‘‘The Bulldog on the Bank and the Bullfrog in the Pool.’’ I have seen his name on several social committees in connection with events at German-American Hall. On some evenings he brought cronies home, like Andy Spiegelhalter. My grandfather was a sport. He made twenty-five dollars a week, and spent it. Probably he was a good machinist; certainly he was regularly employed. In 1895 he founded his own business, A. M. Dettling and Company, in partnership with George A. Henry. Apparently the business failed. It was still listed in the 1897 city di-

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rectory (but at a new address). However, in 1898, the last year of Andrew’s life, he is listed as foreman with F. F. Slocomb and Company. By the year of his death, Andrew and Sophie were the parents of five children, four girls and one boy, the oldest twelve and the youngest less than a year old. Sophie, heretofore the consort of a promising young artisan, with a home of her own, became a thirtysix-year-old widow, the single mother of five young children, an alien in a new land. To make things worse Andrew had let his insurance lapse. Perhaps it was a casualty of the closing of his own business. But Sophie was equal to the challenge. She took in washing and ironing for single men and she rented out a room for three dollars a week. In the evening she had the whole family (those who were big enough) sit around the table and string tags on goods, either price tags or shipping tags. Some of the children would have used brother Andy’s wagon to bring the tags home in boxes. Then the children would put on string through the hole in each tag. Sophie made all the clothes for her children and frowned at the idea of accepting charity. Her mother-in-law would sometimes send such goods as apples and moldy cheese. Mrs. Rosa Yetter, who had a bakery and was my grandmother’s close friend, would save unsold bread and load up the children with it every Sunday. Mr. Stafford, the milkman, would give an extra measure of milk for the money. Grandmother saw to it that they always had plenty of eggs and milk, as well as Mrs. Yetter’s bread. They had soup every day and French toast (using up the bread and eggs) so often that my mother never made it once she had her own home. Stale cream puffs were a treat. When the milk got old it was used for cottage cheese. Soap was also made at home for laundry use. My mother explained to me once that she had to learn to cook after she was married. Before, they were too poor to permit experimenting by the children. The two older children, Mena and Mary, spent a lot of time at their grandmother’s. They were not being entertained, however; they were useful workers in the store. They were fed and housed during the week (they returned home on Saturday evening to go to Sunday school the next morning), but they were not clothed. My mother at twelve, received five cents a week as pay, but the money was not hers to spend; it went into a little bank to be used for new stockings. Her grandmother kept the key to the bank.

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It broke Sophie’s heart when she had to require her two oldest children to leave school at the end of the eighth grade and to work in a textile mill. But Sophie did not intend that her daughters would remain mill workers. Almost immediately they began attending night school, a private business school run by a man named Beacom (and eventually part of Goldey-Beacom College). As soon as possible they left the mill and took clerical jobs. The one boy in the family learned his father’s trade (though he did not work long at it). The youngest girl finished high school before going to work. With her children soon becoming a resource rather than an expense, Sophie’s situation soon improved. She paid off the mortgage quickly and in fifteen years was able to move to a better house in a new and more upscale section of Wilmington. In less than a decade more the family was able to acquire a summer home in the country, a small cottage in the ‘‘single tax’’ village of Arden, where Sophie could have a vegetable garden, a row of raspberries, flower beds and a grove of her own trees, as well as, in theory, resting a weak heart by life on one floor, without stairs. Before she died, in 1925, at the age of sixty-two, Sophie was receiving appeals for financial help from the relatives she had left in Germany. For Sophie, as for her mother-in-law, life in the New World had been challenging. But it had offered opportunities which they had the spirit to grasp, permitting their children to enjoy an easier life in more comfort than the stresses faced by the immigrants.

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18 The Trip to Philadelphia It seems fitting to close this volume, which begins with ‘‘The Philadelawareans,’’ first published in 1945, with ‘‘The Trip to Philadelphia,’’ a previously unpublished glimpse at my early involvement in the Philadelphia-Delaware connection.

WHEN I WAS A BOY THERE WERE THREE WAYS OF TRAVELING TO PHILADELphia from Wilmington, Delaware, my hometown. The first was by trolley car. This trolley ran out Market Street past my home at 3031 Market. It followed the route of the Shellpot trolley to the amusement park at the foot of Penny Hill and then the route of the Holly Oak trolley through northern suburbs. Its ultimate destination was Darby, a suburb of Philadelphia. In Darby, at a small stone waiting room, trolley passengers could board a Philadelphia city trolley to continue the trip downtown, where my mother loved to shop at Wanamaker’s, Gimbel’s, Strawbridge and Clothier’s, or Lit Brothers’, the four leading department stores. (The only credit cards she possessed were to two of these stores, Lit’s and Wanamaker’s.) The ride was long and unpleasant. The only sight I remember was of a man reeling across the street in Chester. ‘‘He’s drunk,’’ my mother explained. This was very interesting to me because I had heard of men being drunk but had never seen one before. It was the era of Prohibition, when public displays of drunkenness, at least in my world, were uncommon. The discomfort of the long ride was increased by the swaying of the trolley as it picked up speed in moving through open country between such suburban towns as Claymont and Marcus Hook or Eddystone and Ridley Park. Though I loved trolley cars, this was our least favorite way of going to Philadelphia. The fastest but most expensive route was by train. Two trains were available, the Baltimore and Ohio and the Pennsylvania. We always 294

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took the Pennsylvania, which had more frequent service and ran to a grand terminal in central Philadelphia, Broad Street Station. I remember getting the train there when I was very young and, with my parents’ amused encouragement, waved to William Penn, whose statue stood atop the City Hall across the street from the station. But my favorite way of getting to Philadelphia—and also the cheapest (twenty-five cents each way)—was by a Wilson Line boat. The trip took two and a half hours on the water, but for me this was a happy time. We took a trolley to the Wilson Line dock at the foot of Fourth Street, transferring at Fourth and Market from the Shellpot trolley we boarded at Thirtieth and Market. At least once my mother and I were worried about being late and had to run into the Wilson Line terminal in a hurry to buy tickets. Once on the boat we would pick seats on the open rear main (second) deck. I remember the names of some of the vessels—‘‘boats’’ I would have called them. The Brandywine and the City of Chester were the oldest and smallest; the City of Wilmington and another boat, the City of Trenton, were newer; the State of Delaware and State of Pennsylvania were the newest and largest, but used mainly for moonlight excursions, not for the daily run. As soon as we were settled my mother and I would eagerly scan the Christiana (so it was then) River shoreline. We would see ‘‘The Rocks,’’ site of the Swedish landing in 1638, and pass a railroad bridge, which would swing open (sideways, not up) before we came to the main attraction for us, Lobdell’s foundry. Before it, on the south shore of the Christiana, we passed the Pyrites plant and then the Lobdell ship canal, a dredged harbor for barges (bearing coal or ore) at right angles to the river. Then came the main foundry building with a big open door facing the river but some distance back. In that doorway my father would be standing, waiting to wave to us. In the Christiana besides the Wilson Line boats we would see smaller cargo boats of the Bush Line, which was more than one hundred years old and also served Philadelphia. Ferries to Penns Grove left from a dock beyond Lobdell’s where the Marine Terminal was later built. Somewhere an excursion steamer, a side wheeler, the Thomas Clyde, was docked. I remember one trip on the Clyde, probably to Augustine Beach, on the Delaware below Port Penn. Near the Wilson Line wharf was a dock just west of Third Street Bridge, where very small river boats brought oysters or other products for sale in Wilmington.

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In my earliest memory of the Delaware River I recall many vessels under sail. All of them were, I believe, coal barges, for sail lasted in the coal trade up the coast from Philadelphia until the 1920s. Most thrilling to me were the freighters, bound for Europe, the Caribbean or elsewhere. I was so thrilled by them that when I was still a boy of ten or so I examined the shipping news in the papers to keep track of arrivals and departures from Philadelphia, and from New York, as well. I cut out rectangles of paper, wrote on them the names of vessels, and tried to keep track of their movements. Some shipping lines advertised their regular sailings. I could keep up with the major Atlantic lines by occasionally buying a New York paper. (I have forgotten my favorite, but it was either the Herald or the Tribune, while the Record and the Ledger were my chief news sources for Philadelphia traffic.) I can still recall that the main Cunard passenger vessels were the Mauritania, the Aquitania, and the Berengaria, and I can still name ships of the Anchor Line (connected to Cunard), the White Star and Red Star lines, the French Line, the United States Line, the North German Lloyd, the Hamburg-American Line, and so forth. I recently came across a brief correspondence I had with a French company in Vera Cruz, Mexico, seeking information on their sailings to Europe as I tried to widen my scope. Leaving the Christiana we passed a long jetty extending out into the Delaware and then our boat headed for a pier at Penns Grove. Once, with my mother and Aunt Mame (my great-aunt and closest relative) we had disembarked here, probably from a ferry, and boarded a trolley at the foot of the pier for a trip to Salem, just to look around. The trolley, as I recall, had a stove in the middle, for use in winter. Usually my mother would have a friend along. My father was sometimes with us, but in my earliest memory he worked a half day on Saturday and, never having a vacation, had little opportunity for this trip. Later he was part of the traveling group. In the late 1920s he took me by boat to Philadelphia to attend a baseball game at Shibe Park or (just once) Baker Bowl (the former for the Athletics, and the latter for the then woebegone Phillies). Not every Wilson Line boat stopped at Penns Grove, but they all stopped at Chester, where the dock was near the Scott paper plant. Here or nearby was a sign declaring, ‘‘What Chester makes, makes Chester’’ to which we boys added ‘‘stink.’’ It was part of an intercity rivalry that extended to high school sports. Chester was a grimy industrial city, but it was Marcus Hook, a suburb with oil refineries,

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A Wilson Line vessel. The Brandywine was the oldest river boat of the Wilson Line in the 1920s. Copy made by Historical Society of Delaware.

that was odorous. (However, so was Wilmington in the vicinity of its morocco plants.) Below Chester there were narrow strips of white sand beach along the Delaware, as there were above it, on the Jersey side, beaches that were eventually fouled by oil. The Bush Line boats docked near the Wilson Line at Chester and so did the Ericsson liners. These were high, narrow ships that ran through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal between Baltimore and Philadelphia. I recall the Lord Baltimore and the John Ericsson. I was never aboard an Ericsson Line boat, but I believe they had staterooms for passengers on the long journey. The ships had to be narrow to pass through the locks, for this was before the canal was enlarged. As we neared Philadelphia, the shipping grew denser. We passed the Navy Yard and Cramp’s ship yard, inactive then, but a major ship builder during World War I. On the southern edge of Philadelphia one plant—Publicker?—gave off a worse smell than Marcus Hook. Ferries darted back and forth across the river in the days before there was a bridge connecting Camden and, south of it, Gloucester with the big city.

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My father told me of a large amusement park that had once been riverside below Gloucester. Boats brought holiday crowds here, he said, and an aerial ride took them from the wharf to the center of the park. Near the site of this park was some sort of children’s home, where one or two excursion boats belonging to this home were usually docked. Besides the sights I enjoyed on the river trip, there was the vessel itself to be explored. The top deck was exposed and windy but had to be visited. Much of the lower deck, where we boarded, was given over to cargo, but near the gangplank toward the stern were one or two booths and some mechanical toys activated by a coin. I loved a machine that had two boxers facing each other. Two people were needed to operate it, each using one of two pistol-like handles with which he could raise the arms of a boxer with the aim of knocking down the opponent by landing a blow on his chin. Another attraction on this deck was a view of the engine room below, where mighty metal plungers surged up and down, powering the propellers that moved the ship. A booth sold candy, tobacco, newspapers, and magazines, including the exciting pulp magazines that I loved—Argosy, Blue Book, Black Mask, Amazing Stories. How happy it made me to settle down with one of these as I tired of the sights and of exploring the ship. When we arrived in Philadelphia, docking at a pier not far south of Market Street, we could walk into the city or to a trolley or to the elevated line, which became a subway in the city center but ran above the ground north to Frankford. Occasionally we visited relatives, for both my father and my mother had cousins in Philadelphia. On several occasions we went to amusement parks, once to Willow Grove Park, where Sousa’s band was playing, a long tiring trolley ride, but also to the closer Woodside Park, within Fairmount Park, riding there once on an open trolley (without sides). Most often, the trip involved some shopping and also, to my delight, lunch in an automat. I loved to put nickels in slots, releasing a small door to get an item of my choice, like lemon meringue pie. Later, as a student at Pennsylvania, the hot table for chicken pie or beef pie (at about fifteen cents each) suited me best, but not in boyhood. Occasionally a vaudeville show, probably combined with a movie, at the Earle, near Ninth and Market, topped our day. Shopping with my mother in a department store was a terrible bore unless I could be allowed to stay in the toy department or, as I grew older, the book department. I remember being there when I

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was so small that my mother took me in the ladies’ lavatory. When I was eleven a glorious day arrived when my parents bought me my first bicycle, a full-size Raleigh, and at once I graduated from the express wagon set to mobility on a vehicle neither of my parents had ever enjoyed. One errant memory survives of walking along Market Street with my parents when I was small and of frequently stooping over to pick a cigar band from a discarded stump. My father, normally tolerant of my collection of stamps, bottle caps, cigar bands, and the like, disapproved of my sidewalk and gutter grubbing in retrieval of bands, but my mother was more tolerant and occasionally pointed her shoe, wordlessly, at a band. When our day in glorious Philadelphia was over, we usually came home by train. Hang the expense. We were tired and we could not enjoy such a grand outing very often.

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CH18

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Index Numbers in italics refer to illustration pages Abolition, 38, 54–55, 166 Adams, James, 31, 34, 66 Adams, John, 34, 274 Adams, Samuel, 96 Addicks, John Edward Charles O’Sullivan, 145–46 Alison, Rev. Francis, 40, 62, 64, 233, 234, 235, 240 Allen, Rev. Richard, 141 Articles of Confederation, 93, 94, 96, 250–51, 260 Asbury, Rev. Francis, 54, 63, 66, 168, 190, 191, 192, 227, 229–30 Atlantic Neptune, The, 249 Baldwin, Dr. William, 39 Baltimore, 83, 84, 142, 171, 174, 186 Baltimore, Lord, 222, 223, 247 Barratt, Philip, 175–76 Barker, William, 247–48 Bassett, Richard, 41, 102, 156–57, 204, 206, 232, 253, 254, 259, 273 Bates, Martin, 279 Bauduy, Peter, 39 Bayard, James A. (1767–1815), 31, 41, 43, , 114, 120, 163, 204, 206, 211, 212, 213 Bayard, James A. (1799–1880), 120, 144 Bayard, Thomas, 144 Bedford, Gunning, 43, 199, 263 Bedford, Gunning Jr., 31, 43, 104, 156, 183, 232, 252, 253, 254–55, 257–58, 259, 260, 263 Bellach, James, 39 Bignall, Dr., 128 Benezet, Anthony, 38 Bennett, Caleb, 206

Bining, Arthur C., 29 Bird, John, 268–69, 274, 275 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 36 Black, Samuel H., 236 Blandy, Thomas, 239–40 Bond, Dr., 42 Bonsall, Vincent, 34 Booth, James, 38 Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (Miller), 212, 213 Bring Out Your Dead (Powell), 132 Broom, Jacob, 156, 252, 253, 255, 259, 263 Brush, John C., 268–80 Burr, Aaron, 211 Bush, George, 208 Calvert, Charles. See Baltimore, Lord Cannon, Patty, 137–38, 139 Carey, Mathew, 34, 247, 249 Carroll, Dr. Kenneth L., 168 Causey, Peter F., 241 Cavender, Wilson, 279 Chew family, 93 Chew, Benjamin, 31, 37, 43–44, 66 Chew, Peggy, 37 Churchman, John, 247 Civil War, 139, 140, 142, 144, 145, 149, 241 Clayton, John M., 120, 121 Clayton, Dr. Joshua, 42, 124 Clayton, Gov. Joshua, 228 Clayton, Sir Thomas, 120–21, 184 Cobbett, William: Porcupine’s Works, 31, 210 Communications media, 34 Coke, Thomas, 191

300

.......................... 10578$

INDX

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301

INDEX

Collector of the customs, 182–85. See also McLane, Allen Collins, Pres. Thomas, 261–62 Connecticut, 113, 256 Constitution (Federal), 250–65 Continental Congress, 87–107 Cooch, William, 279 Cook, John, 103 Cooper, Rev. Ezekiel, 41 Cooper, Ezekiel, 279 Coram, Robert, 38 Crevecoeur, Hector St. John de, 38, 137 Crops. See farms Currency, 61 Delaware: counties of, 30, 52–54; economy of, 30, 31, 32, 36, 52–54; famous sons and daughters of, 36–37 (see also individual entries); geography of, 30, 32–33, 116, 157–60, 245–49; history of, 164–67, 173–76, 177–80, 219–32; politics in, 113–22, 155–57, 210–65 (see also Brush, John C.; Federalists; McLane, Allen; Negroes); population of, 53–54; towns of, 55–56; transportation routes in, 31–33 Delaware College, 40, 233–44 Delaware Gazette, 152, 153, 154 Delaware General Assembly, 268–80 Delaware State University, 148 Des Barres, J. F. W., 249 Devotion, Rev. Ebenezer, 269–70 Dickinson, John, 31, 35, 37, 43, 45, 66, 90, 93, 95, 96, 97, 100–102, 103, 104, 106–7, 137, 155, 156, 209, 225, 227, 232, 251, 253–54, 255, 256–57, 259– 60, 263, 270–71, 275; Letters of an American Farmer, 38, 253; Political Writings, 34 Dickinson, Philemon, 44, 45, 92, 93, 95, 98, 104 Dixon, Jeremiah, 222 du Pont, Charles I., 240 du Pont, E. I., 163, 166, 248 du Pont, Pierre S., 146, 166 Dutch, the, 34, 71, 72, 73, 44, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 135, 153, 165, 246–47

.......................... 10578$

Dutch West India Co., 73 Dyott, Dr. John, 128 Eastburn, Benjamin, 246 Education, 64–66. See also Delaware College; physicians; University of Delaware Edwards, Rev., Morgan, 31, 63 Eggleston, Maj. Joseph, 212, 213 Evans, John, 90 Evans, Lewis, 246 Evans, Oliver, 31, 36 Ewing, John, 40 Farms, 56–58, 84, 139–40 Federalists, 114–15, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 143, 273, 274. See also McLane, Allen Ferrys, 169–72 Filson, John, 65, 249 Finney, David, 43 Fisher, Edward, 125 Fisher, Joshua, 249 Fitch, John, 71 Fitzsimmons, Thomas, 102 Fox, Charles James, 153 Freeman’s Journal, The, 101, 104 Gallatin, Albert, 184, 213 Garrett, Thomas, 138–39 Garrettson, Mrs. Freeborn, 193 Garrison, William Lloyd, 140 Gentworth, Dr. George, 126 George III, 235 Gilbert, Rev. Eliphalet Wheeler, 237–40 Girelius, Laurence, 65 Gorham, Nathaniel, 258 Graham, Mrs. Macauley, 154 Granger, Gideon, 113 Gray, Andrew, 236, 239 Green, James, 307 Griffith, David, 39 Griswold, Rep. Roger, 204 Guthrie’s Geography Improved, 247, 248, 249 Hall, Col. David, 201, 206, 213, 275 Hall, Judge Willard, 278 Hamilton, Alexander, 259

INDX

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302

INDEX

Luff, Dr. Nathaniel, 30, 39, 54, 66, 126, 127, 131–32 Lyon, Rep. Matthew, 204

Hamilton, Andrew, 44 Hammond, Andrew Snape, 249 Handy, Isaac, 241 Harris, James, 169 Haslet, Dr. John, 124, 179, 224, 270 Haslet, Joseph, 119 Herrman, Augustine, 157–60, 247 Horsey, Outerbridge, 275, 277 Howe, Gen., 31, 38, 137 Hundreds, the, 160–62, 262 Indentured servants, 54, 56, 65 Jackson, Pres. Andrew, 121, 185 Jacquett, Peter, 184 Jefferson, Thomas, 38, 115, 116, 117, 127, 210, 211, 212, 213, 274 Johns, Kensey, 38 Johns, Kensey Jr., 120 Johnson, Benjamin, 34 Johnson, Joe, 137–38 Jones, Jacob, 114 Kearney, Dyre, 261 Kentucky, 135, 143 Killen, William, 104, 179 King, Rufus, 257 Kollock, Simon, 224 Lafayette, Marquis de, 186, 19 Land speculation, 94 Latimer, Col. George, 95, 211 Latimer, Dr. Henry, 43, 124 Latta, James, 40, 263 Lawyers, 43–44 Learned societies, 38–39, 40, 42, 123 Lee, Dr. Arthur, 95–96, 98 Lee, Henry, 195, 196, 212 Letters of an American Farmer (Dickinson), 38, 253 Lewis, Samuel, 247 Liberator, 140 Lighthouses, 130 Lincoln, Pres. Abraham, 142, 143, 241 Livingston, Paul, 148 Lockerman, Mathew R., 129 Lockerman, Vincent, 39 Logan, Sen. George, 209

.......................... 10578$

INDX

Macdonough, Thomas, 114 Madison, James, 105, 106, 156, 255, 256, 257, 260 Magaw, Rev. Samuel, 40, 62 Manufacturing. See mills Marshall, Chief Justice, 183 Martin, Woodburn, 279 Maryland, 32, 33, 41, 44, 45, 46, 53, 61, 65, 70, 71, 72, 79, 82, 83, 94, 98, 99, 138, 178, 191, 222–24, , 234, 246, 256 Mason, Charles, 222 Mason, George, 105 Mason, Rev. Richard, 238 Masons, 37, 56 Massachusetts, 173, 178, 179, 232 Maxwell, Robert, 269, 278 McComb, Eleazer, 39, 104, 156, 252 McDowell, Rev. Alexander, 40, 64, 234, 235 McKean, Thomas, 40, 43, 44, 45, 90, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, 104, 106, 177–78, 179, 225, 226 McKee, Dr., 278 McKinly, Pres. John, 100, 104, 124, 226 McLane, Allen, 181–213, 187 McLane, Allen Jr., 203 McLane, Louis, 52, 119, 120, 121–22, 162, 163, 164, 181, 186, 202–7 McLane, Rebecca Wells, 190–91, 192, 207 Mendenhall, Thomas, 31, 127 Mifflin, Benjamin, 56 Mifflin, Thomas, 36, 270 Mifflin, Warner, 36, 38, 39, 55, 136, 137 Miller, Dr. Edward, 30–31, 42 Miller, John, 40 Miller, Rev. Samuel: Brief Retrospective, 212, 213 Milligan, George B., 162–64 Milligan, Miss Grace, 128–29 Mills, 58–61, 59, 163–64, 174 Miranda, Francisco, 31, 37 Mirror of the Times, 274, 276 Mitchell, George, 223

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303

INDEX

Mitchell, Capt. Nathaniel, 199, 261 Moland, John, 43 Monitor, 210 Monro, Dr. George, 43, 270 Montgomery, Joseph, 270 Moore, Gen. Jacob, 227 Morgan, Gen. Daniel, 204 Morrill Act, 241–42 Morris, Gouverneur, 105, 106, 257, 258 Negroes, 135–51. See also slaves Newark Academy, 40, 42, 66, 206, 236, 237, 240 New Castle, 30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 43, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 70– 85, 115, 118, 158, 166, 179, 208, 220, 221, 227, 236, 254, 262–63 New Hampshire, 70, 256 New Jersey, 45, 46, 71, 74, 76, 78. 79, 98, 171, 178, 246, 256 New Jersey Plan, 256, 257 Newspapers, 66, 210 New York, 46, 76, 93, 94, 113, 142, 173, 178, 246 Nicholites, the, 167–69 Nichols, Joseph, 167–69 Niles, Hezekiah, 31, 34, 184, 210 Norris, Mary, 43 North Carolina, 168, 169, 234 Noxon, Thomas, 246 Paine, Thomas, 178 Parke, John, 31 Paterson, William, 256 Patten, Maj. John, 39, 198, 201, 206, 275 Peale, James, 193 Peery, William, 102, 104, 156, 252, 253 Penn family, 222 Penn, Gov. John, 54, 136, 180, 223 Penn, Thomas, 246 Penn, William, 39, 78, 79, 80, 189, 221, 223 Pennsylvania, 43, 45, 93, 94, 98, 101, 102, 106, 173, 178, 180, 189, 195, 224, 232, 234, 246 Pennsylvania Journal, 96 Perlee, Abraham, 39 Peters, Richard, 39 Philadelphia, 29, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38,

.......................... 10578$

39–40, 42, 43, 46, 51, 66, 72, 78, 80, 8, 92, 95, 116, 125, 129, 132, 137, 140, 145, 177, 182, 188, 190, 194, 211, 220, 231, 234, 256 Physicians/medicine, 42–43, 66, 123–34 Pickering, Timothy, 209 Plague/epidemics, 37, 38, 132–34 Political organizations, 38. See also McLane, Allen Political Writings (Dickinson0, 34 Porcupine’s Works (Cobbett), 210 Powell, John: Bring Out Your Dead, 132 Pratt, Dr. Nathan, 280 Priestley, Dr. Joseph, 277 Provoost, Samuel, 39 Quakers, 136, 137, 138, 147, 168, 169, 220, 228, 254. See also Society of Friends Ramsay, David, 40 Randolph, Edmund, 256, 257 Read, George, 40, 43, 45, 93, 94, 95, 101, 102–3, 104, 105–7, 120, 156, 178, 199, 201, 225, 226, 228, 232, 251–52, 254–54, 235, 256, 258–59, 260–21, 263 Read, James, 102 Reading, Rev. Philip, 62 Redding, Louis, 164 Reed, Prof. Henry Clay, 52 Reed, Joseph, 43 Register, The, 34 Religious institutions/figures, 39, 40– 41, 54, 61–64, 66, 72–73, 79, 117, 118, 167–69, 175–76, 190, 191, 192, 197– 98, 199, 200, 205, 206, 228–31, 233, 234–35, 237, 239, 240–41, 271–73, 277. See also Quakers; Society of Friends Rench, James, 125 Revolutionary War, 219–32. See also McLane, Allen Rey, Andrew, 153 Reybold, Maj. Philip, 39 Rhode Island, 256 Richard Lee & Son, 129 Richards, Charles F., 280

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304

INDEX

Riddle, James, 269 Ridgely family, 93 Ridgely, Dr. Charles, 42, 124, 125 Ridgely, Nicholas, 275 Robinson, Thomas, 224 Rochefoucault Liancourt, Duc de la, 31, 33–34 Rodney, Caesar, 92, 95, 101, 104, 120, 125, 168, 177–80, 206, 225, 226, 227 Rodney, Caesar A., 38, 44, 119, 120, 201, 206, 213, 275, 276, 277 Rodney, Daniel, 120 Rodney, Judge Richard S., 29 Rodney, Thomas, 29–30, 33, 53, 68, 95, 104, 125–26, 128, 179, 201 Roosevelt, F. D., 87 Ross, Rev. Aeneas, 39, 62 Ross, Betsy, 36 Ross, George, 39, 43, 65, 93 Ross, John, 36, 39, 43 Rowan, Hamilton, 37 Rush, Benjamin, 42 Rutledge, John, 105 Saulsbury, William, 279 Shallcross, Joseph Jr., 153 Shays’s Rebellion, 153 Sherman, Roger, 257 Shipbuilding, 59–60 Shipley, Elizabeth Levis, 39 Shipley, William, 39 Shippen, Sally, 37 Shippen, Dr. William, 129 Slaves, 54–55, 57, 168. See also Negroes Smith, Dr. Ebenezer, 128, 134 Smith, James, 40 Smith, Samuel, 211 Smyth, W. C., 210 Society of Friends (Quakers), 39, 54, 62–63, 64 South Carolina, 165, 178, 235, 257 Spruance, William, 279 Stockton, John, 38 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 138 Strawbridge, Robert, 63, 229 Stuyvesant, Peter, 70, 73–74, 76, 79 Swart, Anthony, 135 Swedes, 54, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 135, 165 Sykes, James, 89

.......................... 10578$

INDX

Talbot, George, 223 Taney, Justice Roger, 138 Tatlow, Joseph, 32 Thompson, William, 93, 105 Thomson, Charles, 40 Thorne, Rev. Sydenham, 62, 280 Tilton, Dr. James, 30, 38, 39, 42–43, 102–3, 104, 12, 124, 125, 126, 129, 130, 131, 132, 179, 198, 201, 209, 224, 226, 253, 263 Tingley, Rev. Samuel, 62 Transportation, 31–33, 59–61, 82, 83– 84, 85, 169–72 Tubman, Harriet, 138 Turner, Nat, 140 University of Delaware, 148 Van Dyke, Nicholas, 36, 90, 102, 103, 104, 278 Varle´ , Pierre Charles, 249 Vaughan, Dr. John, 30, 124, 127, 128, 129–30, 131, 134 Vermont, 98, 99 Vining, John, 37, 275 Vining, Mary, 37 Virginia, 32, 94, 97, 98, 138, 140, 232, 234, 246 Virginia Plan, 257 Warner, John and William, 31 War of 1812, 114, 131, 163 Warville, Brissot de, 38 Washington, George, 31, 38, 124, 153, 154, 155, 196–97, 206, 208, 209, 255, 227 Way, Dr. Nicholas, 38, 124, 125, 127 Wayne, Anthony, 37 Webb, Capt. Thomas, 63, 229, 230 Wells family, 189 Wells, William Hill, 206 Wesley, Charles, 229 Wesley, John, 63, 175, 229 Wharton, Dr., Charles, 39–40 Wharton, Samuel, 44, 45, 90–93, 94, 95–96, 97, 98, 99, 102 White, Bishop William, 39 Whitefield, George, 107, 229 Whitely, Henry, 236

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305

INDEX

Wilkinson, James, 185 Williamson, Hugh, 40 Wilmington, 32, 33, 34, 57, 82, 84, 124, 125, 129, 132–33, 138, 147, 148, 149, 181–85, 226. Wilmington Courant, 152 Wilson, James, 106 Wilson, Rev. James Patriot, 40, 240 Wilson, Rev. Matthew, 31, 40, 64, 124, 125, 240

.......................... 10578$

Winekoop, Abraham, 29 Winchester, William J., 148 Worrell, Edward, 192, 202 Worrell, Rebecca McLane, 202–3 Yates, Robert, 257 Yong, Thomas, 76 York, Duke of, 39, 77–78, 79, 80, 189 Young, William, 39, 248

INDX

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