Delaware in the Civil War
Delaware entered the American Civil War occupying a position unlike any other state in the Union: a slave state that never seceded, a border state torn between competing loyalties, and a small but strategically significant territory whose political choices carried weight far beyond its modest size. With a slave population that had dwindled to fewer than 1,800 by 1861, Delaware was neither a plantation economy in the Southern mold nor a fully free state in the Northern tradition. The tensions that defined the nation during the war years — between preservation of the Union and the institution of slavery, between Southern sympathizers and Unionist majorities — played out in concentrated form within Delaware's borders throughout the conflict.[1]
Background: Slavery and Division Before the War
Slavery in Delaware had been a divisive issue for decades before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. Unlike the Deep South, Delaware had never built its economy primarily around enslaved labor. The state's geography, its proximity to free states, and the influence of religious communities — particularly the Quakers — had shaped a society in which slavery was in long decline even before the national crisis reached its peak.
Delaware's Quaker population did not own slaves, and the community maintained a principled opposition to the institution. As pacifists, however, the Quakers did not translate that moral opposition into active military support for the Union cause, which complicated Delaware's contribution to the war effort.[2] Other segments of Delaware society were openly sympathetic to the Confederate cause, creating an internal division that characterized the state's political life for the duration of the war.
Despite these divisions, strong support for the Union existed among much of Delaware's general population. The state never held a secession vote and remained formally within the Union throughout the war, supplying troops to the federal army and providing logistical support to the Union war machine.
Lincoln's Plan for Compensated Emancipation
among the most consequential episodes involving Delaware during the Civil War was Abraham Lincoln's attempt in late 1861 to use the state as the first proving ground for a plan of compensated emancipation — a scheme in which the federal government would purchase the freedom of enslaved people from their owners, using public funds to smooth the path toward abolition without the turmoil of outright confiscation.
Lincoln drafted legislation in November 1861 that he hoped would be introduced in the Delaware legislature. The draft read: "Be it enacted by the State of Delaware, that on condition the United States of America will, at the present session of Congress, engage by law to pay . . . in the six per cent bonds of the said United States, the sum of seven hundred and nineteen thousand and two hundred dollars, in five equal annual installments, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, at any time after the first day of January in the year of our Lord one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-seven, within the said State of Delaware." An alternative version of Lincoln's draft would have extended the phase-out of slavery over a period of thirty years.[3]
Why Delaware? Lincoln chose the state deliberately. Its slave population had shrunk to fewer than 1,800 by 1861, making it a manageable test case for a policy that, if successful, might be extended to other border states and eventually used to undercut the economic foundations of the Confederacy. Lincoln also calculated that he could use Delaware's Unionist sympathies to build political momentum for the plan, demonstrating that peaceful, compensated emancipation was a viable path forward.[4]
The plan ultimately failed. Delaware's legislature, influenced by slaveholders and Southern sympathizers within the state's political class, did not adopt the legislation. The defeat was a significant setback for Lincoln's broader strategy of gradual, compensated emancipation as an alternative to the more sweeping measures that would eventually follow.
Delaware's Political Landscape During the War
Delaware's internal politics during the Civil War were shaped by a complex interplay of Unionist sentiment, pro-Southern sympathy, and partisan maneuvering. Among the figures who embodied these tensions was Governor William Henry Harrison Ross, a slaveholder and Southern sympathizer who served as the state's governor during part of the war period. Ross's political positions reflected the divided loyalties that complicated Delaware's relationship with both the Lincoln administration and the Confederate cause.[5]
The state's Democratic Party, which held significant influence in Delaware during this period, often found itself at odds with the Lincoln administration's wartime policies. Conservative Democrats — sometimes called "Copperheads" in the parlance of the era — argued against the expansion of federal power and resisted measures they saw as radical departures from the constitutional order. This faction drew support from Delaware's rural communities and from those whose economic or cultural ties to the South made them skeptical of the Union's war aims.
At the same time, Delaware's Unionist population, particularly in Wilmington and other commercial centers, provided crucial support for the war effort. Delaware sent soldiers to the Union army, and its industries and infrastructure contributed to the logistical demands of a prolonged conflict. The state's geographic position — sitting between the free states of the North and the contested border regions to the south — gave it strategic importance as a transit corridor and supply hub.
Religious Communities and the War
Delaware's religious landscape had a meaningful influence on the state's response to the Civil War. The Quaker community, long present in the state, had maintained a principled opposition to slavery for generations. Their refusal to hold enslaved people placed them outside the mainstream of Delaware's slaveholding class, and their moral witness against the institution contributed to the broader antislavery sentiment that had weakened slavery in the state well before the war began.
However, the Quakers' pacifist convictions meant that their opposition to slavery did not translate into military service or active support for the Union army.[6] This created a particular kind of moral complexity: a community that opposed slavery on principle but could not in conscience take up arms to end it. Other Protestant denominations in the state were themselves divided along lines that reflected the broader sectional tensions of the era, with some congregations leaning toward sympathy with the South and others firmly in the Unionist camp.
Fort Delaware and the Imprisonment of Confederate Soldiers
among the most visible and historically significant aspects of Delaware's role in the Civil War was the use of Fort Delaware, located on Pea Patch Island in the Delaware River, as a prison facility for Confederate soldiers and officers. The island installation became the site of confinement for approximately 12,500 Confederate prisoners during the war, earning it a grim reputation that led some to call it "the Andersonville of the North" — a reference to the notorious Confederate prison camp in Georgia where thousands of Union soldiers perished.[7]
The conditions at Fort Delaware were harsh, particularly as the war progressed and the prison population swelled beyond the facility's designed capacity. Disease, overcrowding, and inadequate supplies took a significant toll on the prisoners held there. The mortality rate among Confederate prisoners on Pea Patch Island was substantial, and the camp became a source of postwar grievance in Southern memory of the conflict.
Fort Delaware's history as a prison camp represents a direct and concrete way in which the war came to Delaware's soil, transforming the state from a passive border case into an active participant in the machinery of the conflict. The fort had originally been constructed as a coastal defense installation, but its wartime repurposing as a prisoner-of-war facility gave it a place in the broader history of Civil War detention and the treatment of prisoners on both sides.
Delaware and the Emancipation Proclamation
When President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Delaware was explicitly excluded from its provisions. The proclamation applied only to states in rebellion against the United States — the Confederate states — and therefore did not free enslaved people in Delaware or the other loyal border states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. This exclusion underscored the anomalous position Delaware occupied: a slave state that had remained in the Union, and whose enslaved population therefore fell outside the reach of Lincoln's most famous executive action.
The failure of Lincoln's earlier compensated emancipation plan for Delaware meant that slavery continued legally within the state until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in December 1865. Delaware's legislature, reflecting the persistent influence of those opposed to emancipation, actually rejected the Thirteenth Amendment at the time of its ratification — a vote that placed the state on the wrong side of the constitutional history it would eventually be bound by. Delaware did not officially ratify the amendment until generations later.
Delaware's Military Contribution
Despite the political divisions within the state, Delaware contributed soldiers to the Union war effort. Delaware men served in regiments that fought in major campaigns of the eastern theater, and the state maintained its formal allegiance to the Union cause throughout the conflict. The tension between the state's Unionist military participation and its Southern-sympathizing political factions reflected the broader contradictions that defined Delaware's Civil War experience.[8]
The state's small size limited the absolute numbers of troops it could contribute, but Delaware's strategic position and its maintenance of internal order made it a valuable asset to the Union. Had Delaware followed the path of secession — a path Lincoln worked actively to prevent — the consequences for the Union's position in the mid-Atlantic region would have been severe.
Legacy
Delaware's Civil War experience left a complex legacy that shaped the state's political and social development in the decades that followed. The failure of compensated emancipation, the persistence of slavery until the Thirteenth Amendment, the imprisonment of thousands of Confederate soldiers at Fort Delaware, and the internal divisions between Unionists and Southern sympathizers all contributed to a postwar environment marked by unresolved tensions.[9]
The state's role as a testing ground for Lincoln's compensated emancipation strategy, however unsuccessful, placed Delaware at the center of among the most consequential policy debates of the war era. Its refusal to secede kept the Union intact at a critical moment, while its resistance to emancipation measures reflected the limits of Unionist sentiment when it came to the fundamental question of human freedom. Together, these contradictions make Delaware's Civil War history a rich and important chapter in the broader story of the American conflict.