As the secession crisis accelerated following South Carolina's departure, Delaware's General Assembly took up the question and rejected it outright, with the state House voting unanimously to remain in the Union. Though a slave state, Delaware's small enslaved population and close economic ties to the North made secession an easy call to reject, a decision that helped anchor the border states.
Delaware occupied an odd position in the sectional crisis: technically a slave state, it held fewer than 1,800 enslaved people by 1860, a fraction of its population, and its economy ran on trade with Philadelphia and the mid-Atlantic rather than plantation agriculture.
When a commissioner from Mississippi arrived in Dover urging Delaware to join the Southern cause, the state legislature's response was swift and dismissive. The House of Representatives voted unanimously to reject secession, effectively ending any serious debate before it began.
Delaware's decision, made this day, mattered beyond its small size. It signaled that the emerging Confederacy would not automatically claim every slaveholding state, and it kept a strategically located territory—bordering Maryland, Pennsylvania, and the Chesapeake—firmly in Union hands throughout the war that followed.