Calendar: February 8

Year: Day to Day Men: February 8

Spring’s in the Air

The eighth day of February in 1865 marks the day the House and Senate of the State of Delaware declared their unqualified disapproval of the 13th Amendment which would have abolished slavery in all the states. Despite Governor William Cannon’s recommendation for its passage, the House and Senate refused to adopt and ratify it as it was ‘contrary to the principles upon which the government was framed’.

Delaware was a slave state on the Mason-Dixon Line. This demarcation line was part of a resolution to end the border dispute between Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia which was part of Virginia until 1863. Drawn between 1763 and 1767 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, it separated those states and established part of their borders. The largest portion of the line, along the southern Pennsylvania border, became informally known as the boundary between the Southern slave states and the Northern free states. 

All efforts to abolish slavery in Delaware prior to the Civil War failed due to a few politically influential Delawareans who were slave owners. As the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation only liberated slaves in the Confederate States, President Abraham Lincoln knew that an amendment to the Constitution was needed to totally abolish slavery in all the states. Thus, the proposal of the 13th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. 

Governor William Cannon sent the 13th Amendment to the General Assembly on the seventh of February with a recommendation of approval. This occurred two months before the surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. The Delaware House and Senate refused passage. Even after the end of the Civil War, Delaware took no action to make slavery unlawful. Slaves in Delaware remained in bondage until the sixth of December in 1865, when the 13th Amendment was ratified without Delaware’s approval.

In early January of 1867, the newly elected Delaware Governor Gove Saulsbury lamented, during his address to the General Assembly, the ratification of the 13th Amendment. On the sixteenth of January, the General Assembly was presented with the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. This would provide due process, equal protection, and the counting of formerly enslaved people as full persons under the law. Since the 1787 Constitutional Convention, only three out of every five slaves were counted to determine a state’s total population for taxation and legislative representation. 

On the sixth of February in 1867, the Delaware House of Representatives rejected the proposed 14th Amendment using the same language as their previous refusal for the 13th Amendment. The 14th Amendment was ratified on the ninth of July in 1868 without Delaware’s acceptance. The last of the three post-Civil War Racial Justice Amendments was the 15th Amendment which gave Black males the right to vote. Again, the Delaware General Assembly refused ratification. This Amendment was declared part of the U. S. Constitution on the third of February in 1870 without Delaware’s approval.

In January of 1901, the new Governor John Hunn called for the General Assembly to dismantle laws passed after the Civil War that impeded voting including the poll tax on voter registration. On the thirty-first of January and the sixth of February in 1901, the Delaware General Assembly dismantled previous restrictive laws and passed a joint resolution which ratified the 13th, 14th and 15th civil rights Amendments of the 1860s.