Delaware was the first of the 13 colonies to ratify the U.S. Constitution. | Getty Delaware becomes first state to ratify Constitution, Dec. 7, 1787

On this day in 1787, all 30 delegates to the Delaware Constitutional Convention ratified the newly written U.S. Constitution. That made Delaware the first state to join the Union — taking the lead in a process that required nine of the original 13 former colonies to approve the document for it to go into effect and thereby turn it into the fundamental law of the land.

With the advent of the Revolutionary War, nearly 4,000 men enlisted from Delaware. Earlier colonial wars had built up a trained Delaware militia. It supplied officers who led Delaware’s forces for all the major engagements of that struggle — from the early battle of Long Island, which the Patriots lost, to the final siege and ultimate victory at Yorktown. However, the battle of Cooch’s Bridge was the only one fought on Delaware soil.


That engagement began Aug. 30, 1777, about two miles south of Cooch’s Bridge (located in present-day Newark, Delaware). The Americans harried the lead forces of the British Army. The Patriots, numbering about 700 men, were both outmanned and outgunned. Gen. George Washington’s forces were slowly driven back.

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By Sept. 3, the Americans had dropped back to Cooch’s Bridge. A handpicked regiment of 100 marksmen under Gen. William Maxwell laid an ambush in the surrounding cover. Over the ensuing battle, the Americans repelled several charges by British troops and Hessian mercenaries. But they eventually ran out of ammunition and called a retreat after having suffered about 30 casualties.

Gen. Charles Cornwallis used the Cooch house as his headquarters for the next week as the British regrouped. Shortly afterward, Gen. William Howe moved his troops out. On Sept. 11, he defeated the Americans at the Battle of Brandywine in neighboring Pennsylvania and subsequently captured Philadelphia.

Before forging a state, Delawareans had to struggle to separate themselves not only from the British Empire but also from Maryland and Pennsylvania, which both had long laid claim to the land. That happened at last in 1776, at the time of the Declaration of Independence, when Delaware formed a separate government from Pennsylvania.

The territorial dispute had begun nearly a century earlier when Cecilius Calvert, the second Baron Baltimore and governor of the province of Maryland, and William Penn, founder and “absolute proprietor” of the province of Pennsylvania, quarreled over ownership of the three counties situated along the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware River estuary.

Their heirs perpetuated the quarrel nearly to the end of the Colonial period. Delaware's boundaries were definitively surveyed in 1763-67 by two Englishmen, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. In the early decades of the young nation, the “Mason and Dixon Line” served as the symbolic cultural divide between Northern and Southern states.

In 1783, the independence of the United States, and therefore, Delaware, was confirmed in the Treaty of Paris.

SOURCE: WWW.HISTORY.COM

