Slavery in Delaware, The Border State That Held On

Delaware presents one of the most complicated stories about slavery in the American experience. It entered the Union as a state where slavery was legal. It remained a slave state throughout the Civil War, never seceding and never abolishing slavery by its own action. It rejected the Thirteenth Amendment in eighteen sixty-five. It did not officially ratify that amendment until nineteen oh one, thirty-six years after it had already become federal law. And yet Delaware was also, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the most heavily free Black state in the South-adjacent United States, with more free Black residents than enslaved ones.

That paradox reflects how geographically and economically marginal slavery had become in Delaware by the antebellum era. The state's northern half was dominated by grain milling and emerging industry rather than plantation agriculture. The southern half, known as lower Delaware or 'the lower counties,' had a tobacco and grain economy that used enslaved labor, but at a scale that bore little resemblance to the great cotton plantations of the Deep South. By eighteen fifty, Delaware held fewer than two thousand enslaved people out of a Black population of nearly twenty thousand.

The free Black community, concentrated in Wilmington but spread throughout the state in small towns and rural areas, built churches, schools, and mutual aid societies despite facing continuous legal restrictions. They could not vote, could not testify in court against white citizens, and could be re-enslaved under vaguely written vagrancy laws. Their freedom was real and precarious at the same time.

For the roughly two thousand people who remained enslaved in Delaware in the eighteen fifties, freedom required either formal manumission by an owner, which happened with increasing frequency as the economic rationale for holding enslaved people weakened, or flight. The borderland geography of Delaware, pressed between the Chesapeake slave territory to the south and the free states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey just across the river to the north, made it one of the most intensely monitored corridors in the entire Underground Railroad.