Dover

Dover, Delaware: Capital of the First State and Crucible of American Independence

Long before the first musket was fired at Lexington and Concord, Dover occupied a distinctive position in colonial American life. Established in 1683 by order of William Penn—who named the town after the English port city and specifically decreed that it would host a courthouse—and designated the capital of Delaware in 1777, this modest town on the St. Jones River served not merely as an administrative center but as the political nerve center of a colony—and then a state—whose influence on the American Revolution far exceeded its small size. The capital was transferred from New Castle to Dover in large part because Dover's central location and its distance from the Delaware River provided safety from British raiders who threatened New Castle by water. Even so, during the war years the state assembly met at various locations across the state—in Wilmington, New Castle, and Lewes—before permanently settling in Dover in October 1781. At the heart of the town lay the Dover Green, a public square laid out in 1717 in accordance with Penn's original warrant, which quickly became the hub of civic, commercial, and military life. Surrounded by government buildings, shops, homes, and taverns, the Green was—as the National Park Service has recognized—a gathering place for market fairs, protests, grievances, and celebrations for over three centuries. The American Planning Association designated the Green a Great Public Space in 2009, recognizing its more than 300 years of continuous civic use; the Green had been added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. Delaware was the smallest colony to join the rebellion against the British Crown, yet its leaders proved among the most consequential figures of the founding era, and Dover was the stage on which many of the Revolution's most dramatic decisions were made. To understand the full story of American independence, one must reckon with what happened here.

The road to revolution in Dover was shaped by a remarkable constellation of political talent. By the mid-1770s, Delaware's leadership included Caesar Rodney, a planter and politician born on his family's plantation, "Byfield," in Dover Hundred, who had served in the Stamp Act Congress and as an associate justice of the Delaware Supreme Court; George Read, a cautious but principled lawyer from New Castle who would become one of only six men to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; Thomas McKean, a fiery patriot who would serve simultaneously as a delegate to the Continental Congress and as chief justice of Pennsylvania; and John Dickinson, the celebrated "Penman of the Revolution," whose Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania had electrified colonial resistance to British taxation in 1767 and 1768. Dickinson's boyhood home, the plantation known as Poplar Hall, stood about six miles southeast of the Green on the St. Jones River, where his family's estate of some three thousand acres stretched toward the Delaware Bay. While in the Continental Congress, Dickinson also authored the Olive Branch Petition to King George III—a last attempt at reconciliation—and the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, and later served as the primary author of the Articles of Confederation. These men did not always agree—Dickinson famously refused to sign the Declaration of Independence, and Read initially voted against it—but their collective engagement with the questions of liberty, representation, and governance gave Delaware, and Dover, an outsized voice in the founding era.

The most dramatic moment in Dover's Revolutionary story belongs to Caesar Rodney. On July 1, 1776, Delaware's delegation in the Continental Congress was deadlocked on the question of independence: Thomas McKean voted in favor, George Read voted against, and Rodney was absent, having returned to Dover to attend to militia business and address Loyalist unrest in the region. McKean sent an urgent message to Rodney informing him that his vote was desperately needed. Gravely ill with a cancerous condition of his face and jaw that caused him chronic pain, Rodney nonetheless mounted his horse and rode nearly eighty miles through a violent thunderstorm—through darkness, rain, and over rough colonial roads—arriving at Independence Hall on the morning of July 2, still in his boots and spurs. His vote broke the deadlock and allowed Delaware to join the colonies voting for independence. Thomas McKean later recalled meeting Rodney at the door "in his boots and spurs." Years later, Rodney's service continued: he was commissioned brigadier general of the Delaware Militia, and in 1778 he was elected President (effectively governor) of Delaware, an office he held until 1781, during which time he helped guide the state's ratification of the Articles of Confederation. He died on June 26, 1784, at Byfield, and in his will ordered the gradual emancipation of the enslaved people on his plantation. A cenotaph honors him at Christ Episcopal Church in Dover, and a statue of Rodney stands in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall.

Dover was not only a political stage but also a military staging ground. On the Green itself, Delaware's Continental Regiment mustered for war. On December 9, 1775, the Continental Congress resolved that troops be raised in Delaware "for the defense of American liberty." Colonel John Haslet—an Irish-born Presbyterian minister and physician who had settled near Milford—was commissioned in January 1776 to command the newly formed Delaware Regiment, known as the "Delaware Blues" or "Delaware Continentals." Consisting of more than 500 battle-ready troops, the regiment was noted for its discipline and striking appearance: David McCullough described them as turned out in handsome blue coats trimmed with red, white waistcoats, buckskin breeches, and white woolen stockings, carrying fine, recently imported English muskets. Six of Haslet's companies were stationed in Dover in the spring of 1776, though arms were in desperately short supply. By August, the regiment had marched north to join Washington's army and fought bravely at the Battles of Long Island and White Plains. Haslet's men remained with Washington for the famous crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776, and the attack at Trenton. Eight days later, on January 3, 1777, Colonel Haslet was killed at the Battle of Princeton. His remains were initially buried in Philadelphia; in 1841, the Delaware General Assembly ordered them reinterred in the Presbyterian Cemetery in Dover, where they rest today.

Alongside the Continental Regiment, Dover raised its own local militia. The Light Infantry Company of Dover, part of the 1st Battalion of Kent County, mustered in on April 2, 1776. Each volunteer was uniformly armed and equipped, wearing a military coat of green faced with red lapels, cuffs, and collar. From December 14, 1776, to January 14, 1777—during what Thomas Paine called the times that try men's souls—Captain Thomas Rodney, Caesar Rodney