On February 8, 1865, the Delaware General Assembly was asked to abolish slavery, and said no.
The vote was not close, and it was not procedural. Both chambers recorded their “unqualified disapproval” of the Thirteenth Amendment and refused “to adopt and ratify” it, on the stated ground that it was contrary to the principles on which the government had been framed. The governor had recommended ratification. The legislature ignored him.
Seventy-eight years earlier, thirty men in a Dover tavern had ratified the Constitution in five days, unanimously, faster than any other state. That speed is on every Delaware license plate. This vote is on nothing.
What makes February 1865 strange is not that a slave state defended slavery. It is the arithmetic. By the 1860 census, Delaware held 1,798 people in slavery. In the same census, the state's free Black population was close to twenty thousand — roughly ninety-two percent of all Black Delawareans were already free, the highest proportion in any slave state in the country.
Delaware, in other words, spent the Civil War refusing to give up an institution it had very nearly stopped practising.
How slavery got so small
The shrinking was not a policy. It was an accumulation, and it happened for reasons that had little to do with conscience at the level of the state.
Northern Delaware's economy had moved toward grain, milling and manufacture — work that did not reward holding people in bondage year-round the way tobacco and cotton did further south. Quaker and Methodist communities pressed hard on manumission, and a great many individual slaveholders freed the people they held, sometimes by will, sometimes by deed, sometimes in stages. The free Black community that resulted was not a marginal population. It was the overwhelming majority of Black Delawareans, and it had been growing for two generations.
But manumission is not abolition. Freeing people one owner at a time leaves the law untouched, and Delaware's law stayed where it was. Free Black Delawareans lived under heavy legal restriction, and the state never took the step of ending slavery itself. What was left by 1860 was a small, mostly rural remnant — concentrated in Sussex and Kent — and a legislature unwilling to abolish it.
The Proclamation did not apply here
This is the part that surprises people, and it is worth stating plainly: the Emancipation Proclamation freed no one in Delaware.
Lincoln's proclamation of January 1, 1863 applied to areas then in rebellion against the United States. Delaware had not seceded. It was a loyal border state, and loyalty was precisely what put it outside the Proclamation's reach. The document that Americans remember as the end of slavery was, as a matter of law, silent about the First State.
Delaware therefore did something the popular timeline does not account for. It carried slavery, legally, through the entire Civil War, and out the far side of it. When the guns stopped in April 1865, people were still held in bondage in Delaware.
Lincoln's offer
Lincoln had seen this coming, and he had tried to solve it in Delaware first.
In 1861 and 1862 he pressed a plan for gradual, compensated emancipation, and Delaware was the test case — the smallest slaveholding population in the Union, the cheapest state to buy out, and, he hoped, a demonstration the other border states might follow. A draft scheme circulated in the legislature would have freed enslaved people over the age of thirty-five immediately and the remainder on a schedule running to 1872, with payment to owners.
It did not pass. The proposal never commanded the votes, and Delaware's legislature declined to be anyone's demonstration. The reasoning recorded at the time ran to states' rights and to resentment at federal direction rather than to any defence of slavery's economics, which by then were thin. Whatever the motive, the effect was concrete: the one state where buying out slavery would have been easiest was the state that refused.
It is worth being careful here. The compensated-emancipation episode is well documented in outline, and the details of who sponsored what, and how the counting went, vary between accounts. What is not in dispute is the outcome. Delaware said no to that too.
December 1865
Slavery ended in Delaware, and Delaware had nothing to do with it.
The Thirteenth Amendment reached the required number of states on December 6, 1865, and was proclaimed in force on December 18. That is the date enslaved Delawareans became free — not by an act of their own legislature, not by proclamation, not by the surrender at Appomattox, but by the ratifying votes of other states, applied to Delaware from outside.
Fewer than eighteen hundred people. Held to the last available day, by a state that had already freed nine out of ten.
Nineteen hundred and one
Delaware ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in February 1901.
By then the vote could not change anything. The amendment had been the law of the land for thirty-five years; slavery had been over in Delaware for a generation and a half; the people it had held were dead or elderly. The ratification was symbolic, and everyone involved knew it. That is what makes it interesting. A legislature went out of its way to record a position on a question that had been settled since before most of its members were in office, which suggests the earlier refusal had not been forgotten, and still itched.
What this does to the story
Delaware's civic identity rests on being first. First to ratify the Constitution, in five days, unanimously, in a rented room because the State House was not ready.
Both things are true, and they are true about the same institution. The assembly that moved faster than any other state in 1787 was the assembly that would not move at all in 1865. The speed and the refusal came from the same place: a small state, acutely protective of its own authority, that acted decisively when its interests were secured and dug in when it was told what to do.
“First State” is a claim about one week in December 1787. It has never been a claim about the whole record, and the record includes February 8, 1865.
The parchment from Dover is in the Delaware Public Archives, and it deserves to be. So does the other vote.
Sources: U.S. Census of 1860 for Delaware's enslaved and free Black populations; University of Delaware, Black History in Delaware resources on the antebellum free African American community; WHYY reporting on emancipation and Delaware; National Archives, Milestone Documents, Thirteenth Amendment; contemporary accounts of the Delaware General Assembly's February 8, 1865 resolution. Census totals are reported slightly differently across secondary sources, some rounding the enslaved population to about 1,900; the figure used here, 1,798, is the 1860 census count. Accounts of the 1861–62 compensated emancipation proposal differ on sponsorship and vote counts, and those details are described here only in outline; the failure of the proposal is not in dispute.