Delaware's refusal to ratify the 13th Amendment

Delaware's refusal to ratify the 13th Amendment

Delaware, the first state to ratify the United States Constitution in 1787, presents one of American history's sharper ironies: the same state that moved quickly to embrace the new national framework was among the last to formally ratify the abolition of slavery, voting against the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 and not reversing that position until February 12, 1901, more than 36 years after the amendment had already become the law of the land. That refusal, rooted in the Democratic Party's dominance of the state legislature and the enduring political influence of pro-slavery sentiment, left Delaware on record as explicitly opposing the emancipation of enslaved people long after the Civil War had settled the question by force. The episode remains a central chapter in Delaware's complex and often troubled relationship with slavery and the civil rights of African Americans.

Background: Delaware and Slavery

Delaware's history with slavery was never straightforward. Geographically positioned at the border between the North and South, the state occupied an ambiguous place during the antebellum era. While slavery existed within its borders, it was practiced on a smaller scale than in the Deep South, and a significant free Black population lived and worked throughout the state well before the Civil War. By 1860, the federal census recorded that Delaware's enslaved population had declined to approximately 1,798 people, while more than 19,000 free Black residents lived in the state, one of the highest proportions of free Black residents relative to the enslaved population of any slaveholding state in the nation. Still, the political and economic interests of slaveholders exercised disproportionate influence over state government, and that influence shaped Delaware's legislative responses to federal measures aimed at ending slavery.

Delaware's three counties reflected sharply different economic and cultural orientations. New Castle County in the north, anchored by Wilmington's growing industrial economy, tended toward more moderate or Unionist positions. Kent and Sussex counties in the south, where agriculture and bound labor remained economically central, harbored stronger pro-slavery sympathies. This internal division wasn't merely cultural. It shaped legislative voting patterns throughout the Civil War era and well into Reconstruction, creating a consistent structural obstacle to any measure that threatened the labor arrangements of southern Delaware landowners.

The state's free Black population, though large relative to the enslaved population, faced significant legal restrictions. Free Black Delawareans couldn't vote, faced limits on their ability to testify in court against white defendants, and were subject to discriminatory enforcement of vagrancy and apprenticeship laws that could effectively return them to coerced labor. Delaware's Quaker and Methodist communities had historically pushed back against slavery, and Wilmington served as a key station on the Underground Railroad. But those antislavery currents never translated into legislative majorities capable of reforming the state's legal relationship with slavery.

Delaware's position as a founding state made its tolerance of slavery a persistent contradiction. It's a contradiction that the University of Delaware has framed directly, describing Delaware as both "first and last" in its relationship to the Constitution and to slavery, first to ratify the founding document, and last among the states that remained in the Union to formally acknowledge the end of the institution the Constitution had long protected.

Lincoln's 1861 Compensated Emancipation Proposal

Before the Thirteenth Amendment ever came to a vote, Delaware was at the center of an earlier federal effort to end slavery through voluntary means. In November 1861, President Abraham Lincoln drafted a proposal specifically targeting Delaware, offering federal compensation to slaveholders in exchange for a gradual, voluntary program of emancipation within the state. Delaware's small enslaved population made it a logical test case. Lincoln believed that if a border state could be persuaded to accept compensated emancipation voluntarily, others might follow.

The plan failed. Delaware's legislature refused to take it up, with opponents arguing that the proposal was an unconstitutional federal intrusion into state affairs and that acceptance would imply that Congress had the authority to interfere with slavery at all. The rejection foreshadowed the more formal refusal that would come four years later. It showed that Delaware's resistance wasn't simply a post-war reaction but a consistent legislative posture maintained across the full arc of the slavery debate. By 1865, that posture had hardened considerably.

The Thirteenth Amendment and Delaware's 1865 Vote

The Thirteenth Amendment was officially certified as ratified on December 18, 1865, formally abolishing slavery throughout the United States after the requisite number of states had approved it. Individual state ratification wasn't legally required for the amendment to take effect once that threshold was reached. But a state's vote, for or against, carried real symbolic and political weight, placing that state on record in the permanent legislative archive.

Delaware's legislature declined to ratify. The vote took place in 1865, and the state's legislators formally refused to "adopt and ratify" the amendment, arguing that its passage was "contrary to the principles upon which the government was framed." That language is worth sitting with. Legislators weren't simply declining to act. They were affirmatively stating that abolishing slavery violated constitutional principles. This framed emancipation not as a moral correction but as federal overreach, a position consistent with the broader states' rights arguments that had dominated Southern and border-state politics for decades.

The legislature at the time was controlled by the Democratic Party, which held majorities sufficient to block ratification without significant opposition. The specific vote tallies from the 1865 General Assembly session are recorded in the Delaware State Archives legislative journals, which document the formal rejection and the accompanying resolution language that condemned the amendment on constitutional grounds. That documentary record ensured Delaware's opposition would be preserved as something more than passive indifference. It was an active, articulated rejection.

The argument that abolishing slavery was contrary to founding principles was remarkable given that the Constitution had always existed in tension with slavery, a tension the Civil War had just resolved through catastrophic violence. For Delaware's political majority, though, the amendment represented an unwelcome transformation of the federal compact rather than a fulfillment of its ideals. That position, stated formally and entered into the official record, would define the state's public identity on the question of slavery for the next 36 years.

Political Context: Reconstruction-Era Refusals

Delaware's refusal to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment didn't stand alone. The Democratic-controlled legislature also refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship and equal protection under the law to African Americans, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited denial of the right to vote based on race. Taken together, these three refusals show a legislature systematically opposed to every Reconstruction-era measure aimed at securing the rights of formerly enslaved people. It wasn't a single vote. It was a pattern.

This resistance was tied to real economic interests. Landowners and agricultural employers in the lower counties depended on low-wage or coerced labor arrangements that formal emancipation would complicate. Acknowledging the end of slavery carried practical consequences Delaware's political elite wasn't ready to accept. The state's Democratic Party also had strong national-level alignments with Southern Democrats who were working to limit the reach of Reconstruction across the former Confederate states, and Delaware's refusals fit comfortably within that broader political coalition.

Delaware wasn't entirely alone in this position, though its circumstances were distinctive. Kentucky also declined to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, having similarly remained in the Union while aligning politically with the slaveholding South. Maryland, by contrast, ratified the amendment in 1865. Mississippi didn't ratify until 1995, with that ratification not formally certified by the federal government until 2013. Delaware's delay was lengthy, but it wasn't without parallel. What made Delaware's case distinctive was its status as a northern, non-Confederate state that nonetheless maintained an explicitly anti-emancipation position in its official legislative record for decades after the war ended.

Symbolism and the Prolonged Refusal

For the generations that lived under the long shadow of Delaware's refusal, the state's stance was more than symbolic. It reflected an ongoing unwillingness among those in power to acknowledge the full humanity and citizenship of African Americans. The Equal Justice Initiative has noted that when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified nationally in 1865, resistance to emancipation took many forms across the country, from legislative obstruction to outright violence, and that this resistance shaped the lived experience of formerly enslaved people and their descendants for decades. Delaware's legislative refusal fit within this broader pattern, even if the state's circumstances differed in degree from those of the Deep South.

During the intervening decades between 1865 and 1901, Delaware's African American residents lived in a state whose official government had explicitly gone on record as opposing their freedom, even as federal law guaranteed it. That gap between formal law and institutional attitude had real consequences for how Black Delawareans experienced government, courts, and civic life. The formal record of the 1865 vote, with its explicit condemnation of abolition as unconstitutional, remained part of the state's living legislative identity throughout this period. It wasn't a distant or forgotten document. It was the current position of the state.

The symbolism of the founding state, the very first to ratify the Constitution, refusing to ratify the amendment that completed the long-deferred promise of liberty was not lost on observers at the time or since. Delaware had placed itself on the wrong side of a defining moral question, and the formal record of that refusal became part of the state's historical identity in ways that neither political change nor the passage of time could easily erase.

Ratification in 1901

Delaware's eventual ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment came on February 12, 1901. That date is Abraham Lincoln's birthday, though whether it was chosen deliberately or fell there coincidentally isn't fully clear from the historical record. By that point, the amendment had been the law of the land for 36 years. Delaware's action was therefore symbolic rather than legally consequential, but it carried meaning as a formal acknowledgment that the state's earlier position had been wrong.

What prompted the 1901 vote is worth examining. By the turn of the century, Delaware's political landscape had shifted. New Castle County's population had grown substantially, driven by industrial expansion in and around Wilmington, and that growth had begun to alter the balance of legislative power away from the agricultural lower counties that had anchored opposition to Reconstruction-era measures. National political pressures had also shifted. The Reconstruction-era amendments were by 1901 long-settled constitutional law, and the practical arguments against ratification had lost whatever force they once carried. Still, 36 years had passed. The political will to act hadn't materialized quickly or easily.

The University of Delaware has confirmed that this delayed ratification did not occur until the twentieth century, a detail that shows just how long the state's official posture of refusal endured. The ACLU of Delaware has pointed to the legislature's original language condemning the amendment as contrary to the principles of government as an example of how deeply embedded resistance to racial equality was within Delaware's institutional history. The 1901 ratification erased that record in a procedural sense. The documentary evidence of the 1865 vote, however, remained part of the permanent historical archive.

Delaware's Apology for Slavery

In a related act of historical reckoning, Delaware formally apologized for its role in perpetuating slavery. The Delaware General Assembly passed the apology in 2016, expressing regret for the state's participation in slavery and for the discrimination that followed emancipation, and acknowledging the lasting harm those institutions caused to African American Delawareans and their descendants. The Equal Justice Initiative situated the apology within a broader national moment of reflection on the legacy of slavery and its aftermath, noting that Delaware's action represented one of a growing number of state-level efforts to formally acknowledge the moral failures embedded in their histories.

The apology represented a different kind of statement than the belated 1901 ratification. Where that earlier action corrected a formal omission in the legislative record, the 2016 apology engaged more directly with the human consequences of slavery and with the state's responsibility for its perpetuation. It carried no legal force. But it was widely noted as a significant moment in the state's ongoing, if uneven, engagement with its history. Whether such acts constitute genuine reconciliation or serve primarily as symbolic gestures has been a matter of ongoing debate in Delaware and in other states that have taken similar steps.

Legacy and Historical Significance

Delaware's refusal to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, and the 36-year delay before the state finally acted, remain central to any honest accounting of the state's history. The episode shows how political institutions can be used to obstruct moral progress and how the language of constitutional principle can be deployed to defend practices that violate the very values those principles claim to protect.

The ACLU of Delaware has argued that understanding this history is essential for evaluating Delaware's ongoing relationship with civil rights and racial justice.<ref>{{cite web |title=Which Side of Black History is Delaware on? |url=https://www.aclu-de.org/news/which-side-black-history-delaware/ |work=ACLU of Delaware |access-date=2025