So I want you to imagine drawing the borders
of a brand new state by just like taking a map,
stabbing a geometer's compass right into the
center of a small colonial town and just sweeping
this giant arbitrary circle across the landscape.
Right. Just completely ignoring the actual geography.
Exactly. Now imagine that that single crude geometric
doodle triggers a literal hundred year legal
battle and it creates this bizarre border dispute
that isn't fully resolved until you know, the
1920s. It's wild because when we think about
how the map of the United States was drawn we
tend to expect some sort of I don't know, grand
design. Yeah, we picture founding fathers pointing
at majestic rivers, making these sweeping, destined
declarations. But then you look closely at the
actual history and suddenly that majestic blueprint
looks more like, well, a messy sketch on a tavern
napkin. It really does. Welcome to this deep
dive. Today, we are opening up a really comprehensive
historical overview of Delaware. Yes, the second
smallest state. Right. And our mission for you
today is to uncover how this tiny state became
this highly contested focal point of European
empires. a literal paradox during the Civil War
and eventually a primary battleground for civil
rights. So, OK, let's unpack this because I promise
you this is not your standard dry history lesson.
Definitely not. This is a story of petty rivalries,
physical exhaustion and intense cultural divides
that explain how the American landscape was actually
built. Yeah. And to truly grasp the chaos of
Delaware, you have to realize that for a significant
part of its early history. The people living
in this region didn't even identify as Delawareans.
Wait, really? What did they identify as? They
identified strictly with their specific county.
So, you know, Newcastle, Kent or Sussex. The
concept of a unified state identity was incredibly
fragmented because the land itself was treated
like, well, a giant bargaining chip. Which makes
total sense when you look at how chaotic the
initial tug of war for this coastline really
was. I mean, long before anyone was arguing about
state identity, this area was a literal battleground
for European corporate interests. Absolutely.
But I do want to start with the people who are
already there, because before any European ship
dropped anchor, this land was home to the Lenni
Lenape, the Susquehanna, the Nanticoke, and other
Native American tribes. Right, and it's important
to note they didn't just immediately lose their
land. They actually engaged in complex trade
with European settlers for about half a century
before the major escalations really began. Yeah,
the European powers were initially just sort
of testing the waters. I mean, the region eventually
gets its English name from Thomas West, the third
Baron de la War, who was the English governor
of the Virginia colony at the time. Right. The
English claimed the entire watershed based on
early explorations, but it was the Dutch West
India Company that actually put boots on the
ground first. In 1631, they established a trading
post at Zwanendale, which is present -day Lewis,
Delaware. But that first attempt was a complete
disaster. Total disaster. The settlement was
destroyed in a conflict with local Native American
tribes almost immediately. But the Dutch just,
they refused to give up their claim to the real
estate. And this brings us to one of my favorite
historical figures, Peter Minuet. Oh yes, Minuet.
He was the Dutch Director General of New Netherland,
but he ends up having this massive... irreconcilable
disagreement with the directors of the Dutch
West India Company. And they essentially fire
him. Right. They recall him back to Europe. They
strip him of his title. And his response to that
termination changes the entire geopolitical trajectory
of the Mid -Atlantic. It is the ultimate revenge
plot. Yeah. He behaves exactly like, you know,
a bitter tech CEO today who gets ousted from
his own company. Yes. He takes his intellectual
property, which in this case is his intimate
knowledge of the Delaware River, and immediately
goes to pitch a rival startup. He goes to the
Swedes. He gets them to fund an expedition in
1638 and sails right back to the Delaware River.
And builds Fort Christina right where modern
-day Wilmington is, basically setting up a competing
headquarters directly across the street from
his old bosses. purely out of spite. What's fascinating
here is that that analogy actually holds up perfectly
because early colonies weren't just flags planted
for a king. They were literal corporate startups
funded by venture capital. Right. The Dutch West
India Company was a corporation. Exactly. So
when Minuit went to the Swedes, he was just securing
new investors. And what makes this move so impactful
is that the Swedes, unlike the Dutch who just
wanted a trading post, actually intended to bring
families and start a permanent self -sustaining
colony. colony. Now, Minuit didn't live to see
it. He actually drowned in a hurricane in the
Caribbean on his way back to Europe that very
same year. But his spiteful little startup took
root. The Swedish and Finnish settlements really
started to grow. I can only imagine how furious
the Dutch were watching this happen. Oh, infuriated
enough to escalate it militarily. The new Dutch
director general, Peter Stuyvesant, marches down
and builds Fort Casimir, which is now Newcastle,
specifically to threaten the Swedes. And the
Swedish governor of the Johann Reising decides
to strike first and captures the Dutch fort.
Which was a fatal miscalculation for New Sweden.
A year later in 1655 an enraged Stuyvesant returns
with an overwhelming military expedition. He
doesn't just take his fort back, he completely
wipes out the new Sweden colony, absorbing the
entire territory back into the Dutch New Netherland
corporate portfolio. It's just wild. But all
of this intense Dutch -Swedish rivalry, all the
fort -building and absorbing, it ends up being
completely moot. Because a decade later, in 1664,
the English sweep in. Right. James, the Duke
of York, easily ousts the Dutch from the area.
So the military conquest phase wraps up relatively
quickly, but that just shifts the chaos from
the battlefield to the courtroom. Exactly. Because
once the English have the land, the bureaucratic
nightmare begins. The Duke of York controls the
territory. Meanwhile, William Penn comes into
the picture. He secures this massive land grant
for Pennsylvania from the King. But Penn looks
at a map and realizes his massive new colony
is completely landlocked. Right. He has no guaranteed
outlet to the sea for trade. And I'm trying to
wrap my head around how you even saw that in
the 1600s. The historical record says Penn persuades
the Duke of York to lease him the western shore
of the Delaware Bay, what they call the lower
counties on the Delaware. Wait, how do you just
lease an entire colony? Like, were they paying
monthly rent on a state? In a way, yeah. Penn's
original charter for Pennsylvania specifically
excluded Newcastle and the land around it. So
he negotiates a proprietary lease from the Duke
of York for the lower counties. It gave Penn
the administrative control and the vital water
access he really needed to make Philadelphia
a functional port city. But there's always a
catch. Another English noble, Cecil Calvert,
The second Baron Baltimore who runs Maryland
looks at his own chart and says, wait a minute,
the key already gave me this exact same land.
Which kicks off a massive lawsuit between the
Penn family and the Baltimore family. And this
isn't just like a quick mediation. This lawsuit
goes to the High Court of Chancery in London
and lasts for almost 100 years. Yeah, the Court
of Chancery was notoriously slow. They dealt
with equity and complex contracts rather than
simple criminal law. When you have two incredibly
wealthy, powerful families arguing over overlapping
royal charters drawn up by kings who had never
even seen a map of North America, the legal unspooling
takes generations. It wasn't until the 1760s
that this battle was finally resolved. And the
resolution of that lawsuit is what finally led
to the hiring of two surveyors named Charles
Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. Right, the famous Mason
-Dixon line. Yeah. They come over to survey the
line between 1763 and 1767 to finally put a physical
border to this century -old legal argument. But
the borders they were forced to draw were absolutely
absurd. To separate Delaware from Pennsylvania,
the court dictated an arc, a literal 12 -mile
circle centered on the cupola of the courthouse
in Newcastle. You have to consider the mechanics
of what they were asking these surveyors to do.
Drawing a perfect 12 -mile radius circle with
17th and 18th century surveying equipment through
dense forests, swamps, and uneven terrain is
practically impossible. And because it was so
difficult, it created a cartographical glitch.
It left this weird, unmapped fragment of land
where the 12 -mile circle failed to neatly connect
with the Maryland border. They called it the
wedge. The wedge. It was a piece of no man's
land that Pennsylvania and Delaware aggressively
argued over until 1921. You had people living
in this wedge who genuinely didn't know which
state they were supposed to pay taxes to for
centuries. It perfectly illustrates how physical
geography is molded by human error and stubbornness.
I mean, a poorly worded royal charter leads to
a hundred year lawsuit, which leads to an impossible
geometric border, which creates a jurisdictional
blind spot that lasts into the 20th century.
So the external borders are a total mess, but
the internal divisions are just as wild. William
Ben had originally set up a combined legislative
assembly for both Pennsylvania and these lower
counties. They're supposed to alternate their
meeting locations between Philadelphia and Newcastle
to keep things fair. But as Philadelphia grew
into this major metropolis, its leaders started
complaining about the travel. In 1704, the lower
counties started meeting entirely separately.
I have to ask. Did they really divide a colony
just because the politicians in Philly couldn't
stand a bad commute? That is precisely what happened.
In the early 1700s, traveling from Philadelphia
to Newcastle meant a grueling multi -day journey
over terrible muddy roads or relying on unpredictable
river transport. The Philadelphia Assemblymen
deeply resented wasting their time traveling
to the sparsely populated lower counties. So
they mutually agreed to separate their legislative
bodies. They still shared the same governor,
but they passed their own laws entirely independently
from that point forward. So sheer physical exhaustion
and annoyance birthed Delaware's independent
political infrastructure. And that independent
streak really hardens over the next few decades.
By the time the American Revolution kicks off
in 1776, Those three lower counties completely
severed ties with Pennsylvania and the British
crown, declaring themselves the Delaware state.
They were so intensely proud of this newfound
total autonomy that their early state governors
actually went by the title of president. And
they backed up that pride on the battlefield,
too. Delaware saw its share of the brutal reality
of the Revolutionary War. The most significant
engagement on their soil was the Battle of Cooch's
Bridge in 1777. Right, this is where roughly
700 American troops under General William Maxwell
try to lay an ambush for the advancing British
army. But the mechanics of early warfare catch
up to them. They are massively outmanned. They
manage to repel a few initial British charges,
but they simply run out of ammunition. Wow. Yeah,
they're forced to retreat, suffering around 30
casualties. And to add insult to injury, the
British general Cornwallis commandeers the Cooch
family house and uses it as his operational headquarters
for the next week. Despite the military setbacks,
though, their political momentum didn't slow
down at all. Following the war, Delaware is incredibly
quick to solidify its identity on the national
stage. As most people know, they become the very
first state to ratify the United States Constitution.
named Irutey Rene Dupont arrives and recognizes
the hydraulic power potential of the Brandywine
River. Ah yes, the Duponts. He builds a massive
gunpowder manufacturing operation there, which
rapidly scales up to become the U .S. military's
largest supplier of gunpowder. But you know,
that industrial success really masked a deeply
fractured society. As we move into the 19th century,
the narrative of Delaware becomes defined by
profound cognitive dissonance. The social paradox
here is staggering. On one side of the ledger,
you have this intense Quaker influence spilling
over from Pennsylvania, heavily pushing for abolition.
Because of this, by 1860, more than 90 % of Delaware's
black population was already legally free. Right.
You have incredible milestones of freedom happening
here. In 1813, a former slave named Peter Spencer
charters the oldest independent black church
in the country right in Delaware, the A -U -M
-P Church. A year later, they start the big August
Quarterly, which remains the oldest African -American
cultural festival of its kind. in the nation.
But on the other side of that exact same ledger,
Delaware was legally and constitutionally a slave
state. The state legislature, dominated by pro
-slavery factions, was actively passing laws
restricting the movement and organization of
free black citizens. The local constabularies,
particularly around Wilmington, were notorious
for their brutal enforcement of runaway slave
laws. And this is what I struggle to comprehend.
How do you reconcile a place that is pioneering
black religious freedom on one hand while simultaneously
allowing its police force to aggressively hunt
runaway slaves and deliberately turning a blind
eye, while criminal gangs actively kidnap free
black citizens to illegally sell them to plantations
further south. It's hard to grasp. But you can
only really understand it through the lens of
a border state mentality. Geography dictates
morality in a very uncomfortable way here. Delaware
was physically, economically, and ideologically
trapped. They shared a border with the fervent
Quaker abolitionism of Pennsylvania to the north.
But their agricultural roots and cultural ties
pulled them toward the plantation economy of
the South. It was a society desperately attempting
to exist in two entirely incompatible realities
at the exact same time. And that pressure cooker
reaches a terrifying climax when the Civil War
finally breaks out. On January 3rd, 1861, the
Delaware legislature votes not to secede. So
they remain loyal to the Union, but they remain
a Union slave state. The internal division was
severe. Confederate sympathies ran incredibly
high throughout the state. While they stayed
in the Union, many Delaware citizens crossed
state lines to fight for the South in Maryland
and Virginia regiments. Although it is a telling
metric that Delaware was the only slave state
from which the Confederacy could not manage to
recruit a full official regiment. Now, here's
where it gets really interesting and dark. This
brings us to one of the most harrowing chapters
in the state's history. Delaware physically traps
the entire ideological conflict of the American
Civil War onto a tiny, inescapable island. By
1862, the federal government takes Fort Delaware,
which was originally just a harbor defense facility
built on Pea Patch Island in the middle of the
Delaware River, and presses it into service as
a massive prisoner of war camp. It essentially
becomes the tragic microcosm of the fractured
country. You have union guards from the north,
confederate POWs from the south, federal convicts
and local political prisoners all crammed together
on this swampy piece of land. And the day -to
-day reality of this place is horrifying. Initially,
the conditions were considered somewhat tolerable,
but after the massive battles of Vicksburg and
Gettysburg in the summer of 1863, the population
of Fort Delaware completely explodes. It swells
to over 12 ,000 people. They had to frantically
build these crude wooden barracks that became
known as the bullpen. And when you cram 12 ,000
traumatized, malnourished men onto a tiny river
island, disease absolutely ravages them. The
mortality rates skyrocketed. By the time the
war ended, the fort had processed almost 33 ,000
prisoners and roughly 2 ,500 of them died right
there. That is awful. About half of those deaths
were the result of a devastating smallpox outbreak.
The rest succumbed to scurvy, dysentery, and
typhoid fever, driven by the contaminated water
and horrific sanitation. And it wasn't just enemy
combatants suffering there. Because the federal
government had suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus,
political dissidents were swept up and held on
Pea Patch Island without any trial whatsoever.
A prime example is Reverend Isaac W .K. Handy.
Oh, the dinner party story. Yes. He was at a
private dinner party in 1863 and made an offhand
comment that the Civil War had tarnished the
American flag. Yeah. Someone reported him. And
for that single dinner conversation, he was locked
up at Fort Delaware for 15 months. 15 months
for a dinner comment? And that level of ideological
stubbornness and division didn't magically evaporate
at Appomattox when the war ended. In February
1865, just two months before the Confederacy
surrendered, the Delaware legislature formally
voted to reject the 13th Amendment. They explicitly
voted to continue the institution of slavery.
They held onto it until the bitter absolute end.
Slavery only ended in Delaware because the national
ratification of the amendment legally forced
their hand in December of 1865. And their resistance
didn't stop there. Delaware outright rejected
the 14th and 15th Amendments during Reconstruction
as well. They didn't even get around to symbolically
ratifying the 13th Amendment until 1901. Wow,
1901. 35 years after it became the law of the
land. That deep -seated legislative refusal was
a massive warning sign for the racial friction
that would dominate the state's trajectory for
the next century. Which brings us to a deeply
painful era of this history. Now before we dive
into this, I want to be incredibly clear to you
listening. We are impartially reporting the historical
facts of these politically charged, racially
intense events exactly as they are laid out in
the source material we are using. Right, absolutely.
We are just neutrally outlining the actions of
the legislature, the figures involved, and the
historical record of this era as provided in
the text. taking sides or endorsing viewpoints.
Exactly. So looking at that historical record
following the Civil War, the Democratic controlled
government in Delaware aggressively imposed a
white supremacist regime very much mirroring
the actions of the former Confederate states
further south. In 1866, the Delaware legislature
officially declared black residents to be second
class citizens and severely restricted their
voting rights. The legislative pushback against
federal civil rights efforts was systematic.
When Congress passed the 1875 Civil Rights Act,
Delaware lawmakers feared it might force social
equality. In response, they passed aggressive
Jim Crow laws that mandated strict racial segregation
across public facilities. They went as far as
writing the segregation of the educational system
directly into the state constitution, explicitly
demanding that separate schools for white and
colored children shall be maintained. And that
constitutional mandate, locking in segregated
schools, stayed in place for nearly 80 years.
It wasn't until 1952 that a massive legal challenge
finally broke through. A case called Gephart
v. Belton was brought before the Delaware Court
of Chancery. The court actually ruled that the
segregated schools were unconstitutional because
the facilities provided to black students were
profoundly unequal. And that Delaware ruling
was monumental because Gebhardt v. Belton became
one of the five foundational cases that were
combined and presented to the United States Supreme
Court, culminating in the landmark 1954 Brown
v. Board of Education decision, which struck
down public school segregation nationwide. But
as we know, declaring segregation over on paper
in Washington, D .C. is very different from enforcing
it on the ground. The backlash in Delaware was
severe and incredibly disruptive. A man named
Bryant Bowles founded a group called the National
Association for the Advancement of White People,
the NWWAP, specifically to fight the integration
of Delaware schools. Right. When Milford High
School attempted to enroll 11 black students
into their previously all -white school, Bowles
capitalized on the local anger and organized
a massive boycott. The scale of the resistance
was staggering. In October 1954, a mass meeting
in Milford drew 3 ,000 people. The boycott essentially
shut the education system down. Out of 1 ,562
students, only 456 showed up for classes at Milford
High the following day. Wow. The resistance movement
even spread to neighboring towns like Lincoln,
where elementary school pupils started boycotting
in solidarity. And the pressure campaign worked.
Facing mass protests, cross -burnings, and intense
rallies, the local school board ultimately caved
to the mob and expelled the 11 Black students.
Now, Bowles was eventually arrested for conspiring
to violate state education laws, and the attorney
general revoked his organization's charter the
next year. But the damage to the integration
timeline was done. That localized friction effectively
delayed the desegregation of schools in most
of southern Delaware for more than a decade.
The schools there weren't fully integrated until
1967. This raises an important question really.
It's a stark lesson in the mechanics of societal
change. You have federal mandates handed down
from the highest court in the land, crashing
headfirst into deeply entrenched local resistance.
It proves that a victory achieved on paper often
requires decades of painful localized human struggle
before it manifests as reality. Absolutely. So
stepping back, look at the incredible chaotic
journey we've mapped out today. We started with
Peter Minuet building a spiteful corporate fort
just to stick it to his old bosses. We watched
a sluggish 100 -year lawsuit force surveyors
to draw an arbitrary 12 -mile circle that defined
a disputed border until the 1920s. Yeah, the
wedge. We saw the horrors of a fractured nation
crammed onto the swampy Pea Patch Island POW
camp and we witnessed Delaware become the reluctant
volatile crucible for American school integration.
The overarching narrative here is that geography
and culture are never just given. They are negotiated,
fought over, and shaped by incredibly human flaws,
spite, convenience, exhaustion, stubbornness,
and eventually the painful, agonizing push toward
progress. I want you to think about your own
state or your own country. How much of your local
culture, your borders, or your political identity
is truly the result of some grand, destined design?
And how much of it is just because a politician
300 years ago hated a long commute and decided
to draw a line in the mud? It completely reframes
how we view the permanence of the world around
us. Exactly. Which leaves me with this one final
thought for you to explore on your own. If the
very borders of a state can be drawn with an
arbitrary compass to create a cartographical
glitch like the wedge, and its entire civil rights
trajectory can be altered by a handful of stubborn
actors and historical accidents, How permanent
are the political and geographic identities we
cling to so fiercely today? Might the maps and
cultural lines we consider absolutely fixed right
now look entirely different a century from now,
just waiting for someone else to unpack them?