The State House was not finished, so they met in a tavern.
In the first week of December 1787, thirty men gathered on the north side of the Dover Green, in a building operated by a man named Battell, to decide whether Delaware's three counties would accept the constitution drafted in Philadelphia that September. Ten delegates had been elected from each county at a special election held on November 26. They convened the following week.
They took five days. The vote was unanimous. A clerk copied the decision onto a large sheet of parchment, and on Friday, December 7, 1787, the delegates signed it. That parchment survives. It is held today by the Delaware Public Archives, and it is the reason every Delaware license plate says The First State.
What it does not explain is the stranger question underneath: how three counties that had spent most of the previous century as an appendage of Pennsylvania were in a position to ratify anything at all.
"The Three Lower Counties"
For most of the colonial period, Delaware did not exist as a named political entity. What existed were the Three Lower Counties upon Delaware — New Castle, Kent, and Sussex — a territory with a genuinely peculiar legal status. Control of the territory passed from Swedish to Dutch to English hands by 1664. In 1682 the Duke of York conveyed it to William Penn, who wanted it for a reason that had nothing to do with governing it directly: Pennsylvania's access to the Atlantic ran through the Delaware River, and the Lower Counties controlled the approach. Penn needed the river mouth.
So the Lower Counties became part of Penn's holdings — but they were not Pennsylvania. They had been settled earlier, by different Europeans, with a different religious character and different economic interests than the Quaker-dominated politics of the upper province, and the arrangement produced friction almost immediately.
The assembly of 1704
The resolution was structural, and it came through Penn's Charter of Privileges of 1701, which allowed the Lower Counties and the upper province to form separate legislative assemblies if they could not agree to sit together. They could not. On May 22, 1704, the assembly of the Lower Counties met for the first time as its own legislative body, at New Castle.
From that point forward, Delaware had its own legislature — and continued to share a governor with Pennsylvania. That arrangement, an odd hybrid of legislative independence and executive union, held for the next seventy-two years. It is worth pausing on how unusual this was: Delaware was not a separate colony in the full sense, and it was not a county of Pennsylvania either. It was a jurisdiction that legislated for itself and was governed by someone else's governor. Nobody designed this. It accumulated.
1776, twice
The separation became complete in the summer of 1776, and Delaware did it in two directions at once. On June 15, 1776, the assembly — meeting at the New Castle Court House — passed what is now known as the Act of Separation, breaking from Britain and from Pennsylvania's proprietary government in a single session. Thomas McKean and Caesar Rodney, who had represented the Lower Counties together at the 1765 Stamp Act Congress, were the ones who proposed it. Three weeks later the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, and that September Delaware adopted its first state constitution, formally styling itself "the Delaware State."
This is also the point in the story where Caesar Rodney makes his more famous appearance, and where some care is required. Rodney, one of Delaware's delegates to the Continental Congress, rode from Delaware to Philadelphia in early July 1776 to break his delegation's deadlock on the independence vote. The ride happened, and his arrival was decisive for Delaware's vote. The version usually told — the all-night ride through a storm, timed to the minute, arriving boots-muddy in the doorway just as the roll was called — has accumulated dramatic detail over two centuries that the contemporaneous record does not fully support. Treat the vivid version as local tradition built around a real event, not as documented history in every particular. The statue on Rodney Square in Wilmington commemorates something that happened; it does not authenticate every sentence usually attached to it.
Five days in Dover
Eleven years later, the Philadelphia convention produced a constitution and sent it to the states. Delaware's legislature moved fast, directing that ten delegates be elected from each county on November 26, 1787, and that they convene the following week. The delegates met at Battell's Tavern because the State House was still under construction. They deliberated for five days and ratified unanimously — thirty votes, no dissent.
No other state came close to that speed or that unanimity. Pennsylvania ratified five days later, after a far more contentious convention. Several states took months, and a few ratified by narrow, bitterly contested margins.
Why Delaware went first
The speed was not primarily patriotic enthusiasm. It was arithmetic. The central fight at the Philadelphia convention had been over representation: whether states would be represented in the national legislature in proportion to population, or equally regardless of size. Large states wanted proportional representation. Small states — and Delaware was among the smallest — understood that proportional representation in both chambers would render them permanently irrelevant.
The compromise that emerged gave every state equal representation in the Senate. For Delaware, that was not one provision among many; it was the entire point. A state with three counties would have the same Senate voice as Virginia. Historians generally read Delaware's rapid, unanimous ratification as the predictable response of a small state that had secured its core interest and had no reason to wait. There is no evidence the delegates in Dover understood themselves to be claiming a permanent historical title. They were ratifying a document that protected them. Being first was a consequence of moving quickly, and moving quickly was a consequence of being satisfied.
What "First State" means
The nickname is accurate and narrower than it sounds. Delaware was the first state to ratify the United States Constitution. It was not the first European settlement in North America, not the first English colony, and not the oldest continuously governed territory in the country — Delaware's own founding settlement, New Sweden, dates to 1638 and postdates several others on the continent.
"First State" is a claim about December 7, 1787, and nothing else. That it has come to function as a general claim of primacy is a good illustration of how a precise historical fact becomes a loose civic identity.
The parchment is the thing to hold onto: thirty men, a rented room, five days, and a unanimous signature on a document that took a jurisdiction which had spent seventy-two years borrowing Pennsylvania's governor and made it a state equal, in the Senate, to any other.
Sources: Delaware Public Archives, Ratification Document record; U.S. National Park Service, "Delaware's 12-Mile Arc" and First State National Historical Park materials; contemporary news coverage of Delaware Day. The popular account of Caesar Rodney's ride is treated here as local tradition around a documented event, not as a fully verified sequence of details.