Although I wrote most of the copy for the Delmarva Millennium series, I assigned a few of the stories to other writers. The following two stories are examples of work that I conceived, assigned, edited and largely rewrote. They appeared in Volume 1 of the series. For more information on the Delmarva Millennium series, click here.Cruel punishment was not unusual
By Michael Morgan
Most of the colonists who settled Delmarva in the 17th century came from a European culture that had barely emerged from the Middle Ages, a time when torture and ghastly physical punishments were considered cornerstones of respectable society.
Fear of the savage consequences that would result from an unlawful act was considered by most colonists as the major bulwark in maintaining law and order.
Convicted criminals were taken from the courtroom and flogged with a leather whip, locked in a pillory (often with their ears nailed to it), or branded with a hot iron. Those who were convicted of serious crimes were summarily hanged.
After the punishment was administered, the criminal returned to society. To identify criminals, some prisoners on Delmarva were required to wear cloth letters that were an inch wide and four inches high. Thieves wore a "T' and forgers sported an "F." Judges who feared that criminals would not adhere to this dress code sentenced felons to have their ears sliced off as a sign of their wrongdoing.
There was a long list of crimes subject to harsh corporal punishment -- it included not only crimes considered serious today, such as murder and rape, but also such offenses as robbery, sodomy and witchcraft. Public whippings, a favored punishment for many crimes, were even invoked for bearing children out of wedlock. In 1679, a Delaware woman who bore three illegitimate children was sentenced to 21 lashes. When she had another child out of wedlock, the woman was given 31 lashes and banished from the colony.
The colonists had inherited from England the practice of banishment, a system by which many criminals were sentenced to be transported to the American colonies. Most of the criminals were banished for seven years, and during this time, they could be bought and sold as indentured servants. Plantation owners on Delmarva supplemented their workforce by purchasing convicts.
The exact number of convicts who were sent to Delmarva during the colonial period is not known; but in 1755, transported criminals composed an estimated 10 percent of the white male population of Queen Anne's County.
By the beginning of the 18th century, jails had been constructed in most Delmarva counties. These early jails were very small, and they were used mainly to hold debtors, vagrants or suspects awaiting trial.
Unlike today's prisons, these county jails did not separate male and female prisoners, nor did they segregate serious offenders from minor criminals -- "rogues, vagabonds, sturdy beggars and felons" were housed together, according to an 18th-century account.
Reform movement
During the early 19th century, the pacifist Quakers in Pennsylvania put forth a new philosophy on how to punish criminals -- but it barely took root in Delaware. Reformers advocated that archaic corporal punishment be replaced by "penitentiaries," where criminals would contemplate the error of their ways, see the light, and emerge from their cells ready to take their place in society.
At the Maryland Penitentiary, inmates were given a cell, a Bible and a job. Male prisoners worked in textiles, shoemaking and other trades. Female prisoners made combs, brooms, and other items. For several decades, the money generated by prison labor was sufficient to cover the costs of the operation of the Maryland Penitentiary.
But in southern Delaware, the penitentiary philosophy was mocked by legislators who clung to the belief that harsh physical punishment was a strong deterrent to crime. Efforts by upstate legislators to revise the state's penal code were repeatedly defeated by downstate legislators, even in the face of growing public distaste for public whippings and the like.
Throughout the 1800s, attempts to rid Delaware of its colonial-era penal code failed, and it wasn't until 1889 that corporal punishment for female criminals was abolished. The pillory was abolished in 1905, but the state's infamous whipping post, nicknamed "Red Hannah," remained in use despite continuing public criticism.
In 1935, in response to complaints after a Philadelphia newspaper published a photograph of a whipping, the Delaware legislature banned, not whippings, but the photographing of them.
The last public whipping in Delaware took place in 1952, but the whipping law remained on the books until the 1973.
Maryland abandoned its colonial-era penal code long before Delaware did, but sometimes the brutal justice of the lynch mob was just as bad, with several lynchings occurring in the late 1800s on the Eastern Shore.
Counties carried out their own hangings, which were a public spectacle until a 1923 law decreed that they be conducted privately at the state penitentiary. A Somerset County man named George Chelton had the unfortunate distinction of being the first Marylander executed under the new law.
Virginia's Accomack and Northampton Counties also carried out their own executions, putting four convicted criminals to death between 1870 and 1900. During that period, the Eastern Shore had "more violent crime than it does now, by a long shot," according to historian Miles Barnes. A little like the Wild West, residents often packed pistols and knives, which sometimes led to bloody crimes of passion.
Today, some Delmarva residents have given up on the philosophy that criminals can be reformed by a penitentiary. They support strict "law-and-order" legislation and hard time for repeat offenders. But even so, it's doubtful that public whippings and hangings, once prevalent on the peninsula, will ever return to Delmarva.
Political change came slowly on Delmarva
By Lynn R. Parks
"Life (in central Delmarva) was carried on in small, scattered, isolated communities where traditions and customs became strongly established. Rural simplicity prevailed in a slowly changing culture. These were the conditions that provided an atmosphere hostile to reform."
So wrote historian Robert G. Caldwell about 19th-century resistance to reform of the penal code in Delaware's Kent and Sussex Counties. But the description could well apply to political reform in general throughout Delmarva -- an area where resistance to change, and the independent streak common to rural settlers, led to political isolation in the 1800s.
Revolutionary dissension
But at the time of the Revolutionary War, Delmarva was less isolated, as it sat squarely in the geographic center of the American colonies. Politics on Delmarva reflected political battles going on throughout the colonies between the patriots who favored independence and the Tories who were loyal to England.
Delaware, said by John Adams to have more Tories in proportion to its population that any other state, dealt with eight of its more troublesome loyalists to the British crown by sentencing them to be hanged, "but not until dead," then cut down, disemboweled and beheaded. The sentence was later set aside by the Delaware General Assembly, but its severity was an indication of the political fervor -- and archaic criminal code -- of the period.
In Snow Hill, Md., 60 citizens erected a liberty pole, only to have it torn down by two Tories. A patriot fort built on Wallop's Island, one of Virginia's Eastern Shore barrier islands, was destroyed by a British privateer.
But even then, according to historian William H. Williams, isolated Delmarva citizens "simply went about the business of making a living and hoping for the best." The era of political isolation was beginning.
Slavery and racism
By the 1860s, rural Delmarva was growing more isolated from an increasingly industrialized nation, and the issue of slavery increased political tensions.
Despite Delaware's official loyalty to the Union, local politicians refused to accept plans for the emancipation of slaves, even though most farmers on the peninsula had abandoned tobacco, the labor-intensive crop that required slave labor.
In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln received only 24 percent of Delaware's vote, finishing behind two other candidates.
Despite national approval of the 13th Amendment, which freed the slaves, in 1865, the Delaware General Assembly in 1866 passed a resolution which stated that the white race is "superior" and that "all attempts to elevate the negro to the social or political equality of the white man is the result either of an unwise and wicked fanaticism or a blind and perverse infidelity."
Even when the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution were already the laws of the land, freeing slaves and giving them full civil rights, Delaware did not ratify them until the first decade of the 20th century. The First State wasn't just slow to recognize the voting rights of blacks -- it was among the last states to grant women the right to vote.
Maryland's Eastern Shore delegation was little better. "Conditioned to maintaining a racial caste system that had been in continuous existence for over two centuries ... Eastern Shore slaveholders stood immobile as the winds of social change swirled about them," writes John R. Wennersten in Maryland's Eastern Shore, A Journey in Time and Place.
The whipping post
Delaware's adamant stand against penal-code reform, which lingered until 1973, when it abolished its whipping-post law, was a classic example of how geography shaped Delmarva politics. Because southern Delaware legislators held the majority of votes in the state, upstate legislators were unable to push a modernization of the criminal code through the General Assembly. Politicians from Kent and Sussex Counties held firm to the belief that the state's harsh corporal punishments were a deterrent to crime, and many lower Delaware residents supported that contention.
The efforts to abolish the whipping post and pillory began as early as 1777, but it took decades for any significant changes, such as the elimination of whippings for women, to be enacted. It was not until after a 1972 Supreme Court decision requiring legislative districts to be drawn according to population that upstate legislators were able to abolish the whipping post, which by then had become a national embarrassment for the state.
The secession solution
Delmarva's island-like geography has always influenced its politics. "Three states, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, have sovereignty over the Eastern Shore; (but) the name Delmarva testifies to the political allegiance of its inhabitants," writes Wennersten.
As early as 1776, delegates from the Eastern Shore introduced motions of secession in the Maryland General Assembly.
During the railroad boom of the late 1800s, complaints that more money was being spent on new railroad lines on Maryland's mainland led to suggestions that the state's Eastern Shore counties secede and become part of Delaware. Contemporary bumper stickers -- "Secede now" and "There is no life west of the Chesapeake Bay" -- indicate that even after more than 360 years as a part of Maryland, the Eastern Shore is still not quite sure the relationship is a good one.
The Eastern Shore of Virginia has had its own taste of secession from the mainland, but it hasn't been by choice. The area is sometimes left off maps of Virginia -- once in campaign literature handed out by a candidate for governor, and another time when the state map was printed on the back of warm-up jackets for University of Virginia athletes. Some shore residents joked that if Accomack and Northampton Counties seceded and became part of Maryland's Eastern Shore, some Virginia residents may not notice.
New political battles
The ever-increasing population on Delmarva has in recent years has spawned a new political battle, this one between the advocates of preservation and the proponents of growth. Preservationists argue that overdevelopment is ruining the peninsula's natural beauty, and the quality of life that was once so attractive. Others say a booming economy raises the standard of living for all Delmarva residents. Some proponents of development ask, "Is it fair to close the door on newcomers who want to live on Delmarva?"
As with upstate vs. downstate battles, and Eastern Shore vs. mainland issues, Delmarva's politics continue to be shaped by its geography.