Lewes 250 Anniversary Commission launches with Sept. 18 event
Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part series honoring the U.S. anniversary. This article is reprinted with permission from the National Constitution Center’s website.
June 15, 1776: The seeds of dissent stirred in the soil that day. Three lower counties of Pennsylvania (later to become the colony of Delaware) fearlessly declared their independence from the British Crown. Three months later, Delaware enacted its Declaration of Rights.
Before the 13 colonies proclaimed their independence on July 4, and long before the Constitution was ratified on June 21, 1788, Delaware played a significant role in the revolutionary and constitutional process (it was the first colony to ratify the Federal Constitution). Much of that courageous revolutionary spirit was on display in Lewes, the first town in the first state.
In so many ways, the life force of American independence took root in Lewes, where liberty pole gatherings dauntlessly condemned King George III and where British cannonballs attempted to crush that rebellious temperament.
Looking back
As early as 1766, patriotic trouble brewed in Lewes. Protestors, known as “the Sons of Liberty,” boldly contested the Stamp Act, which unfairly taxed the colonists. The law, they complained, was “unconstitutional” and “destructive of [their] natural rights and liberties … .”
That rebellious tension continued unabated; in time, it evolved into a revolutionary spirit. Two days after the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress, John Haslet, a Presbyterian clergyman and soldier, wrote to Caesar Rodney, a Continental Congress member from Delaware, from Lewes: “I congratulate you … on the Important Day, which restores to Every American his Birthright! A Day which every freeman will record with gratitude and the millions of Posterity with Rapture.”
As recounted by Kim Rogers Burdick in “Revolutionary Delaware: Independence in the First State”: “In Lewes, two weeks later, Haslet’s Delaware Continental Regiment celebrated with a reading of the Declaration of Independence, [replete with] three cannon blasts and three toasts.”
For Delaware, 1776 was both a revolutionary and constitutive period. By September of 1776, Delaware had forged its Declaration of Rights. Advanced as it was for its time, it lacked any commitment to equality for all persons; its remedies for injustices were confined to “freemen” (sect. 12). Hence, unlike the inspirational principle ordained in the Declaration of Independence and the equality clause contained in Virginia’s 1776 Declaration of Rights, the Delaware Declaration of Rights had no such guarantee.
It did, however, contain one of the first free press clauses: “That the liberty of the press ought to be inviolably preserved.” (sect. 23) In that respect, it honored that fundamental liberty long before the First Amendment, which was not ratified until 1791. While constitutional equality for people of color was a long time coming to Delaware (it did not ratify the Civil War Amendments until 1901), constitutional liberty for press freedom was a vital part of the colony’s fundamental charter.
As we prepare to celebrate 250 years of declared independence, it is well to remember that people live in historical context; sometimes, even as freedom blooms, injustices persist. Such realism is patriotic since it honors what is best in our heritage, while it seeks to correct past wrongs. As it is said, the dead live on the lips of the living. By that measure, truth is seldom a one-way, glorious story. And yet, in the tumble of it all, there is much in our revolutionary tradition to inspire us, even if our ideals sometimes fell victim to iniquity.
It is against that backdrop that the Spirit of ’76, at the national and state levels, will be remembered and reflected upon by those of us in Lewes at 3 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 18, at the Lewes Public Library when Mayor Amy Marasco will participate in her first press conference.
