Delaware was the second smallest of the 13 original colonies. The boundaries of colonial Delaware contained just 1,982 square miles, divided among three counties: New Castle (the northernmost county), Sussex (the southernmost and largest county), and Kent (situated between Sussex and New Castle). The southern portion of colonial Delaware rested squarely on broad Atlantic coastal plains and contained approximately 190 square miles of wetlands. The northwestern portion of the colony yielded to gently undulating foothills, most prominent in New Castle County. The Delaware River and Delaware Bay dominated the landscape, as the river flowed from north to south, past the towns of New Castle and Wilmington and into the Delaware Bay, ultimately emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. In part due to the trade advantages associated with the region’s proximity to a navigable river and the Atlantic Ocean, European powers competed for control of the region.
Original Inhabitants
Archaeological evidence suggests that as early as 6500 B. c. nomadic hunters and gatherers subsisted within the Delmarva Peninsula. Between A. D. 1000 and 1300 indigenous populations began developing less nomadic methods of hunting and gathering as they increasingly relied on local LIshing spots and rudimentary agricultural production methods. Thus, by the time Europeans arrived in the region, Native American communities had enjoyed thousands of years of uninterrupted use of the Delmarva Peninsula’s lorests, streams, wetlands, and bays.
When the first European colonists arrived in the early 17th century, three indigenous tribes considered the
Delmarva Peninsula their homeland. The two most prevalent Native American tribes, the Lenope and the Lenape, shared a common, although slightly varied, Algonquin language. The Lenope and Lenape became distinct tribes in about A. D. 1300. The two tribes migrated seasonally, relied on the fishing resources of seasonal fish migrations and the hunting resources of Delaware’s virgin forests, and lived adjacent to the Delaware River and the Delaware Bay. The third Native American tribe, the Nanticoke, lived in the southwest portion of the Delmarva Peninsula in what would later be known as Sussex County. The European colonists referred to these three culturally and ethnically distinct Native American tribes as Delaware Indians.
The relationship between the Lenape and the European colonists is emblematic of the overall relationship between Delaware Indians and the colonists. Beginning in the early 17th century, the Lenape enjoyed more than 50 years of cordial trading with Dutch and Swedish colonists. This often mutually beneficial relationship continued while Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania ruled the Delaware colony.
Yet, the story of European encroachment on Native lands does not involve simply peaceful trading relationships. By the mid-18th century a combination of European settlement of Native hunting grounds, European diseases (to which the Native American population lacked immunity), and a growing European population forced the Native Americans from the lands of their ancestors. This involuntary diaspora resulted in the Lenape’s mid-18th-century migration, first to western Pennsylvania (to profit from the lucrative FUR trade), and subsequently to Ohio, Canada, and, in some cases, past the Mississippi River to present-day Oklahoma. Despite the Lenape’s forced eviction from land their ancestors had roamed for more than 1,000 years, the Lenape language and culture survive to this day.
European Control of Delaware
The European control of the Delaware colony often resembled an imperial game of musical chairs; many major European powers—including England, the Netherlands, and Sweden—competed for an opportunity to sit in Delaware’s chair. It would not be until England wrested control of Delaware from the Dutch in 1664 that the music would finally stop, with England in sole control of Delaware.
Attempting to locate a northwestern water route to Asia, Dutch explorer Henry Hudson voyaged into the Delaware River (what he called “South River”) in 1609, marking the initial European foray into the Delmarva Peninsula. The Dutch did not attempt a permanent settlement until 1631, when they established a 28-man settlement at Cape Henlopen on Lewes Creek named Zwaanendeal. Ostensibly aimed at harvesting and selling the lucrative whale oil evident in Delaware Bay’s abundant whale population, the settlement lasted less than a year before an unknown band of local Indians killed the colonial settlers, purportedly due to a misunderstanding resulting from an Indian “theft” of a Dutch tin coat of arms. The Dutch did not attempt to resettle in the Delaware region for another 24 years.
In 1638 the New Sweden Company established a permanent settlement on Minquan Kil (eventually renamed Christiana River to honor the queen of Sweden). As the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) raged on the European continent, Sweden aimed to become a strong colonial power, yet from 1648 to 1654 the Swedish settlement did not receive any supply shipments from Sweden. The initial settlement did not number more than 200 Swedes and Finns and ultimately failed to create Swedish hegemony in the Delmarva Peninsula.
By 1655 disputes over the control of the Delaware River and the fur trade that relied on the river’s transportation caused the Dutch to reassert control of the Delmarva Peninsula. In that year the Dutch captured the Swedish Fort Christiana and incorporated Delaware into the preexisting New Netherland. Dutch colonial successes, however, were short lived, as their appetite for colonial power collided with a more robust and powerful English appetite for colonial supremacy.
In 1664 a British naval force commanded by James, duke of York (who in 1685 became King James II of England), captured New Amsterdam. A smaller group of warships commanded by Sir Robert Carr subsequently attacked the Dutch stronghold at New Amstel. The British renamed this northern Delaware town New Castle. From 1664 to 1682 a deputy of the duke of York governed the Delaware region as a portion of the English colonial possession.
In 1682 European possession of the colony again changed hands, although this time not between countries but rather between citizens of the same country. Maintaining ultimate English control of Delaware, William Penn, proprietor of Pennsylvania, requested and obtained control of the Delaware region from the duke of York. Penn allowed the northernmost of the three counties to remain named New Castle, but he renamed the two southernmost counties Kent and Sussex.
The Delaware colony was not yet independent, as Delaware remained a collection of counties belonging to Pennsylvania, alternately known as the “Government of the Counties of New Castle, Kent, and Sussex on Delaware” or simply as the “Lower Counties.” William Penn’s Act of Union in 1682 ensured that residents of the Lower Counties received an equal voice in Pennsylvania’s General Assembly. Despite Penn’s attempts to maintain union among Pennsylvania and the Lower Counties—including having the General Assembly meet in New Castle in 1684, 1690, and 1700, away from its traditional seat of power in Philadelphia—Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania and the more heterogeneous Lower Counties were unable to coexist in the same legislature.
In 1701 William Penn allowed the divided legislative assembly to meet separately. In 1704 Delaware’s assembly met independently for the first time in New Castle. Although meeting in a separate assembly, the Penn family’s proprietary relationship to Delaware would continue until the Revolutionary War.
Slavery and the Delaware Economy
Beginning in the mid-17th century, enslaved African labor provided the backbone of Delaware’s ECONOMY. Swedish control of Delaware (1638-55) brought a limited number of African slaves to the region due in part to the limited maritime assets of the New Sweden Company, yet after only nine years of Dutch control (and colonial access to the Dutch West India Company’s thriving slave trade), in 1664 slaves already represented approximately 20 percent of the Lower County population. Whereas European indentured labor provided the impetus to successful economies in early Virginia and Maryland (later to be shifted to slave labor), Delaware’s economy lacked sufficient indentured servants; as a result, slave labor almost exclusively developed Delaware’s economy.
The late-17th and early-18th century agricultural economy encountered fluctuating (although often high) prices for domestically produced TOBACCO, corn, and wheat. By the mid-18th century tobacco ceased to be a lucrative crop in Delaware, and large planters increasingly used slave labor to produce wheat and corn.
Delaware on the Eve of Revolution
On the eve of the American Revolution, Delaware had attained its status as one of America’s 13 original colonies. European settlement, westward expansion, and DISEASE had caused the death or migration of the vast majority of the colony’s Native American population. In 1770 between 20 and 25 percent of Delaware’s population was of African descent, and more than 95 percent of the African population continued their enslaved toil in the fields, homes, and parlors of the affluent members of Delaware’s white society. Although initially hesitant to sign the Articles of Confederation, Delaware became the first state to ratify the United States Constitution.
Further reading: John A. Munroe, History of Delaware (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993); William H. Williams, Slavery and Freedom in Delaware 1639-1865 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Books, 1996).
—Christopher Rodi
World History
