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History of slavery in Delaware

History

The institutional history of slavery in Delaware began with the arrival of Swedish colonists and the establishment of New Sweden in 1638. Like contemporary English and Dutch colonies on the eastern seaboard, the Swedish colony faced a chronic labor shortage, and this shortage spurred the use of enslaved labor. Some early colonists attempted to use enslaved native American laborers, but this was intermittent as the local native population was too low to support such a system. Unlike the nearby English-controlled Maryland colony, New Sweden could not rely on a large influx of indentured laborers, and so this source of labor was also closed to the colony.

The first enslaved African, a man named Anthony, was imported to Delaware in 1639 and worked as a servant for the Swedish governor. Several other African slaves were likely imported to the colony, but their numbers remained small as Sweden lacked the necessary trade connection to fully participate in the Atlantic slave trade. When the Dutch annexed New Sweden in 1655, the institution of slavery was expanded - just as the Swedes before them, the Dutch colony was unable to attract large numbers of European settlers, and so turned to enslaved persons as a labor source. Unlike the Swedish, the Dutch West India Company had the naval power and trading experience to successfully compete in the Atlantic slave trade and so were able to import larger numbers of enslaved Africans. By 1663, sources estimate a minimum of 125, or 20 percent of the Delaware colony's population, black slaves were in Delaware.

Many colonial settlers came to Delaware from Maryland and Virginia, where the population had been increasing rapidly. The economies of these colonies were chiefly based on labor-intensive tobacco and increasingly dependent on African slaves because of a decline in working class immigrants from England. Most of the English colonists had arrived as indentured servants (contracted for a fixed period to pay for their passage), and in the early years the line between servant and slave was fluid.

Most of the free African-American families in Delaware before the Revolution had migrated from Maryland to find more affordable land. They were descendants chiefly of relationships or marriages between white servant women and enslaved, servant or free African or African-American men. Under slavery law, children took the social status of their mothers, so children born to white women were free, regardless of their paternity, just as children born to enslaved women were born into slavery. As the flow of indentured laborers to the colony decreased with improving economic conditions in England, more slaves were imported for labor and the caste lines hardened.

By the end of the colonial period, the number of enslaved people in Delaware began to decline. Shifts in the agriculture economy from tobacco to mixed farming resulted in less need for slaves' labor. In addition local Methodists and Quakers encouraged slaveholders to free their slaves following the American Revolution, and many did so in a surge of individual manumissions for idealistic reasons. By 1810 three-quarters of all blacks in Delaware were free. When John Dickinson freed his slaves in 1777, he was Delaware's largest slave owner with 37 slaves. By 1860, the largest slaveholder owned 16 slaves.

Although attempts to abolish slavery failed by narrow margins in the legislature, in practical terms the state had mostly ended the practice. By the 1860 census on the verge of the Civil War, 91.7% of the black population were free; 1,798 were slaves, as compared to 19,829 "free colored persons".

An independent black denomination was chartered in 1813 by freed slave Peter Spencer as the "Union Church of Africans". This followed the 1793 establishment in Philadelphia of the African Methodist Episcopal Church by Richard Allen, which had ties to the Methodist Episcopal Church until 1816. Spencer built a church in Wilmington for the new denomination. This was renamed as the African Union First Colored Methodist Protestant Church and Connection, more commonly known as the A.U.M.P. Church. In 1814, Spencer called for the first annual gathering, known as the Big August Quarterly, which continues to draw members of this denomination and their descendants together in a religious and cultural festival.

Delaware voted against secession on January 3, 1861, and so remained in the Union. While most Delaware citizens who fought in the war served in the regiments of the state, some served in companies on the Confederate side in Maryland and Virginia Regiments. Delaware is notable for being the only slave state from which no Confederate regiments or militia groups were assembled. Delaware essentially freed the few slaves who were still in bondage shortly after the Civil War but rejected the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution; the 13th Amendment was rejected on February 8, 1865, the 14th Amendment was rejected on February 8, 1867, and the 15th Amendment was rejected on March 18, 1869. Delaware officially ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments on February 12, 1901.