Delaware becomes the first state Dec. 7, 1787Back to top
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 in the Union — taking the lead in a process that required nine of the original 13 former colonies to approve the document and thus eventually to make it the fundamental law of the land.
With the advent of the Revolutionary War, nearly 4,000 men enlisted from the small state. 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 to the final siege of Yorktown. The battle of Cooch’s Bridge on Sept. 3, 1777, was, however, the only one fought on Delaware’s soil.
Before forging a state in their own right, 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 began a 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 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, “Mason and Dixon’s Line” served as the symbolic cultural divide between the Northern and Southern states.