Delaware votes against secession on January 3,…

Delaware votes against secession on January 3, 1861, and so remains in the Union.

While most Delaware citizens who fight in the war will serve in the regiments of the state, some will serve in companies on the Confederate side in Maryland and Virginia Regiments.

Delaware is notable for being the only slave state from which no Confederate regiments or militia groups are assembled.

Many colonial settlers had come to Delaware from Maryland and Virginia, where the population had been increasing rapidly.

The economies of these colonies were chiefly based on tobacco culture and were increasingly dependent on slave labor for its labor-intensive cultivation because of a decline in working class immigrants from England.

Most of the English colonists had arrived as indentured servants, under contracts to work as laborers for a fixed period to pay for their passage.

In the early years the line between indentured servants and African slaves or laborers was fluid, and the working classes often lived closely together.

Most of the free African-American families in Delaware before the Revolution had migrated from Maryland to find more affordable land.

They were descendants chiefly of relationships or marriages between white servant women and enslaved, servant or free African or African-American men.

Under slavery law, children took the social status of their mothers, so children born to white women were free, regardless of their paternity, just as children born to enslaved women were born into slavery.

As the flow of indentured laborers to the colony decreased with improving economic conditions in England, more slaves were imported for labor and the caste lines hardened.

By the end of the colonial period, the number of enslaved people in Delaware had begun to decline.

Shifts in the agriculture economy from tobacco to mixed farming resulted in less need for slaves' labor.

In addition, local Methodists and Quakers had encouraged slaveholders to free their slaves following the American Revolution, and many did so in a surge of individual manumissions for idealistic reasons.

By 1810 three-quarters of all blacks in Delaware were free.

When John Dickinson freed his slaves in 1777, he was Delaware's largest slave owner with thirty-seven slaves.

By 1860, the largest slaveholder owned sixteen slaves.

Although attempts to abolish slavery failed by narrow margins in the legislature, in practical terms, the state had mostly ended the practice.

By the 1860 census on the verge of the Civil War, 91.7% of the black population were free; 1,798 were slaves, as compared to 19,829 "free colored persons"