Delaware Colony

Delaware Place
Colony (United States)
1684–1783 →
Capital	New Castle, Delaware
Language(s)	English
Government	Constitutional monarchy
Legislature	General Assembly of Delaware Colony
History
- Established	1684
- Independence	1783
Currency	Pound sterling

Delaware Colony in the North American Middle Colonies was a region of the Province of Pennsylvania although never legally a separate colony. From 1682 until 1776 it was part of the Penn proprietorship and was known as the lower counties. In 1701 it gained a separate Assembly from the three upper counties but had the same Governor as the rest of Pennsylvania.

Dutch and Swedish Settlement

The first European exploration of what would become the Delaware Bay and the Delaware River by the Dutch ship Halve Maen under the command of Henry Hudson in 1609. Follow-up expeditions by Cornelius May in 1613, and Cornelius Hendricksen in 1614 mapped the shoreline of what would become Delaware for inclusion in the New Netherlland colony. Initial Dutch settlement was centered up river at what is today Philadelphia and across the river from it. The first attempt to settle Europeans in the territories that would become the State of Delaware was not made until 1629 when agents of the Dutch West India Company Gillis Hossitt and Jacob Jansz arrived to negotiate with the Native Americans to "purchase" land for a colony. (It was a rule among the Dutch that Native American land must always be purchased and never seized by force, but as the concept of land ownership was alien to the Americans, there was a great deal of cultural confusion attached to the transactions with the Dutch "payments" taken for gifts in keeping with Native custom.) Hossitt and Jansz secured a treaty granting the Dutch a parcel of land running along the shore eight Dutch miles long and half a Dutch mile deep (roughly 29 by just under 2 US miles), nearly coincidental with the coast of modern Sussex and Kent counties in Delaware.

In 1631 the Zwaanendael Colony was established on this land, with the initial settlement at what is today Lewes Creek. A cultural misunderstanding with the Native Americans led to the massacre of the initial 28 colonists before a year was out. Patroon David Pietersz. de Vries arrived shortly thereafter with an additional 50 settlers. Although he concluded a treaty with the Indians, deVries, his partners in Holland, and the Dutch West India Company decided the location was too dangerous for an immediate reattempt and the additional settlers were landed in New Amsterdam (New York) instead.

In March 1638, the Kalmar Nyckel anchored at a rocky point on the Minquas Kill that is known today as Swedes' Landing (in Wilmington, Delaware.)^[1] The New Sweden Company was organized and overseen by Clas Larsson Fleming, a Swedish admiral and administrator. Samuel Blommaert, a Flemish director of the Dutch West India Company who had grown frustrated with the company's policies assisted the fitting-out^[2] The expedition was led, and had been instigated by Peter Minuit, the founding governor of New Netherland who had been dismissed by the Dutch West India Company which operated the colony as a concession. Minuit resented the company and was welll aware of the spareness of Dutch occupation along the Zuyd (Delaware) river valley. Like the Dutch colony it aimed to squat, New Sweden was a multicultural affair, with Finns, Dutch, Walloons (Belgians) and Germans as well as Swedes among the settlers.

The first outpost of the Swedish settlement was named Fort Christina (now WIlmington) after Queen Christina of Sweden. Governor Johan Björnsson Printz administered the colony from 1643 until 1653. He was succeeded by Johan Classon Risingh, the last governor of New Sweden.^[3] The Dutch had never accepted the Swedish colony as legitimate and the struggle between the forces of the Dutch West India Company and the officials and backers of New Sweden was on going. In 1651, New Netherland Governor Peter Stuyvesant had removed Fort Nassau, which had been established upriver in what is now Glouster City, New Jersey and had it reassembled down river of Fort Christina as Fort Casimir, effectively encircling the Swedish colony. (The Dutch had previously built Fort Beversreede, modern Philadelphia, upstream.) THree years later, the New Sweden colony attacked and seized the outpost, renaming it Fort Trinity. The struggle finally came to an end in September 1655. With the Second Great Northern War raging in Europe, Stuyvesant assembled a sufficient army and naval squadron to capture the Swedish forts, thus re-establishing control of the colony. Fort Casimir/Trinity was again renamed as New Amstel (later translated to New Castle) was made the center for fur trading and the colony’s administration headquarters^[3] and the area's European population began to boom.

English Conquest

In 1664, after Colonel Richard Nicolls, captured New Amsterdam, Sir Robert Carr was sent to the Delaware River. He took over New Amstel, pillaging it and brutally maltreating its settlers, some of whom he sold into slavery in Virginia. Carr translated the name from Dutch into English and it has been known since as New Castle.^[1] Carr and his troops continued down the shore, ravaging and burning settlements, including the famous Mennonite utopian community of Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy near present day Lewes, Delaware, which was utterly destroyed. This effectively ended the Dutch rule of the colony and, for that matter, ended their claims to any land in colonial North America. Delaware was thenceforth claimed by New York under a Deputy of the Duke of York from 1664 to 1682, but not actually held in the Duke's possession nor his colonists, a situation taken advantage of by the proprietors of Maryland.^[1]

Durham County, Maryland

Between 1669-72, Delaware was an incorporated county under the Province of Maryland (see here). When the Duke of York made use of his charter on behalf of courtier William Penn, through conveyances made by the governor of New York, there was a brief conflict of interest between the Catholic, Tory and whose son was likewise a sometime Jacobite sympathizer Lord Baltimore with their friend the aforesaid Duke, but this was a hard fought court battle subsequently relegated to a proprietary dispute between the Calvert and Penn families, since both were held in favor by both the King and Prince James. The Mason-Dixon line is said to have legally resolved vague outlines in the overlap between Maryland and Pennsylvania, which pretty much awarded Delaware to Pennsylvania, although Delaware would eventually prove too independent for legislation north of New Castle (as well as that from the southerly Chesapeake Bay), leading to the separation from Pennsylvania and unique pioneer status as America's first state, tied to neither province's destiny. English speaking colonists in the area were more inclined towards the Calvert proprietorship, albeit Penn's religion and one of these men was the Irish Quaker forefather (James Nixon, 1731 arrival) of future President Richard Nixon, while House Minority Leader, and presidential successor, Gerald Ford owed his roots to a forefather not so distant, from Philadelphia, of the Devonshire King family.

New Castle, Kent and Sussex counties, Pennsylvania

The area now known as Delaware became owned by William Penn, the Quaker owner of Pennsylvania. In contemporary documents from the early Revolutionary period, the area is generally referred to as "The Three Lower Counties on the Delaware River" (Lower Counties on Delaware) or by the names of the three counties, all of which retained linguistic and cultural connections to those of new york New Castle, which related well to North East England's Newcastle as the defunct Durham County, Maryland (both Newcastle and Durham were relatively close to the Calvert regional identity as that of Northern England--and as landlords in County Longford, of the Irish Midlands, their barony shared some characteristics with the earlier English Catholic plantation by Mary I of England and Philip II of Spain in Queen's and King's brothers), while Kent was contiguous with neighboring Kent County, Maryland and Sussex generally held a similar origin to Sussex County, Virginia, being the furthest removed from Penn's colony. The term "Lower Counties" refers to the fact that they were below the fall line, or farther downstream, on the Delaware River than the counties constituting and integrally within Pennsylvania proper, such as Philadelphia, Chester and Bucks counties.

After William Penn was granted the province of Pennsylvania by King Charles II in 1681, he asked for and later received the lands of Delaware from the Duke of York.^[3] Penn had a very hard time governing Delaware because the economy and geology was largely the same as that of the law he has ordered. He attempted to merge the governments of Pennsylvania and the lower counties of Delaware. Representatives from both areas clashed heavily and in 1701 Penn agreed in having two separate assemblies. Delawareans would meet in New Castle and Pennsylvanians would gather in Philadelphia.^[1] Delaware, like Philadelphia and unlike Maryland, continued to be a melting pot of sorts and was home to Swedes, Finns, Dutch, French, in addition to the English who constituted the dominant culture.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d} Faragher, John Mack, ed. (1990) The Encyclopedia of Colonial and Revolutionary America. New York: Sachem Publishing Associates, Inc., pp. 106-108.
2. ^ A History of the Kalmar Nyckel and a New Look at New Sweden by John R.Henderson [1]
3. ^ ^{a b c} State of Delaware (A Brief History). State of Delaware. 2007-01-21.

Other sources

• Johnson Amandus. The Swedish Settlements on the Delaware, 1638-1664 (Philadelphia: Swedish Colonial Society, 1911)
• Weslager, C. A. A Man and His Ship: Peter Minuit and the Kalmar Nyckel ( Kalmar Nyckel Foundation. Wilmington, Delaware. 1989)