The Rise and Fall of a "Free" Delaware: The Missouri Crisis and the Invention of the Free State in the Mid-Atlantic

Abstract

This article examines both the origins of the "free state" concept in U.S. history as well the little-known, brief period that Delaware was widely considered a "free state." Americans had long talked about "slaveholding" and "non-slaveholding" states—but it was not until the late 1810s and early 1820s that northerners began to use the words "free state." This change represented a rhetorical escalation from "non-slaveholding state" to a term with an even clearer moral valence. But it was not originally obvious to observers exactly which states should be included in the "free" cohort, and, for a time, white Delawareans were successful in convincing themselves and their fellow Americans that they should be counted amongst the northern free states. This article charts Delawareans' arguments in favor of their "free state" status, as well as, over time, their state's fall from grace into the "slave state" category. That it was only in the years after the Missouri Compromise that a nebulous group of non-slave states solidified into an identifiable core of "free" ones demonstrates that the development of the sectional divide in the pre-Civil War era was more gradual and more uncertain than previously thought. It reveals a process of negotiating a "free" identity on a state level that did not mirror reality on the ground. Finally, it uncovers the rhetorical process behind the large-scale erasure of enslaved African Americans' realities in the creation of the "Free North" myth along its borders, even when the evidence of their existence and their experiences would have been impossible for their white neighbors to ignore