December 7, 1787: Delaware Becomes the First State
On December 7, 1787, Delaware's convention voted 30-0 to ratify the U.S. Constitution, making it the first state in the Union.
On a December day in 1787, the smallest state in America did the biggest thing first.
On December 7, 1787, thirty delegates gathered in Dover for Delaware's ratifying convention. The new Constitution -- signed in Philadelphia less than three months earlier, on September 17, by 37 of the 55 convention delegates -- was read and debated. Then came the vote: 30 to 0, unanimous. Delaware became the first state to ratify the Constitution of the United States, earning the nickname it still carries today: the First State.
Delaware's hurry made sense. It was a tiny state -- three counties, the smallest legislature in the nation -- and it had felt the failures of the Articles of Confederation sharply. Under the Articles, Congress could not tax, could not regulate trade between the states, and could not reliably pay the debts of the Revolution. For a small coastal state tucked between bigger neighbors, a stronger national government meant security, not tyranny. Delaware's delegates had gone to Philadelphia with one firm condition -- that every state keep an equal vote in the Senate -- and once the Convention protected that in the Great Compromise, Delaware was ready to say yes.
That yes mattered more than it looks from this distance. The Constitution would take effect only if nine states ratified, and nothing about that was certain. The ratification battles ahead -- in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York -- would be fierce, close-run things, decided by pamphlets, speeches, and late-night bargaining. Delaware's swift, unanimous vote gave the Constitution its first domino and its first momentum.
Delaware had a habit of showing up first. Eleven years earlier, with the Continental Congress deadlocked over independence, Delaware's Caesar Rodney had ridden 70 miles through a rainstorm from Dover to Philadelphia to cast the deciding vote for independence. In December 1787, Delaware was first again -- this time to approve the republic the Revolution had made possible.
The rest followed, state by state, until New Hampshire became the ninth to ratify on June 21, 1788, and the Constitution became the law of the land. Government under it began on March 4, 1789.
More than two centuries later, Delaware still calls itself the First State -- on its license plates, its flag, its quarter. It is a reminder that in the founding of a nation, being small is no bar to being first, and that sometimes the most important vote is the one cast before anyone else is ready.
Photo: Niagara, CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
