Even students of American history as avid as myself may not have heard of…ummm…(checks notes)…Caesar Rodney?!?
The Midnight Ride of Caesar Rodney Brought America Independence
Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of…Caesar Rodney. While Rodney might not have a famous poem written about his nighttime journey, his ride was just as historic as Revere’s and vital to the passage of the July 1776 Declaration of Independence.On July 2, 1776, the delegates for 13 colonies at the Continental Congress voted for American independence from Great Britain. (It then took the delegates two days to agree on an edited draft for the public, hence our July 4 holiday.) But what many Americans don’t know is that, on July 1, independence hung in the balance — and one man came to break a tie and ensure the establishment of a new nation.
Before the Revolution, Caesar Rodney had already been involved in politics, having served as a Justice of the Superior Court for the Three Lower Counties and a colonial legislator. Indeed, according to the National Park Service (NPS), Rodney had attended the 1765 Stamp Act Congress, and he had “usurped the prerogative of the proprietary Governor by calling a special meeting of the legislature at New Castle” after Parliament closed Boston’s harbor in 1774. Then Rodney went with his former collaborators, Thomas McKean and George Read, to be delegates for Delaware in the First Continental Congress.
During his time in the Continental Congress, however, Rodney periodically returned to Delaware for military or political duties (he was a militia colonel). NPS states that Caesar Rodney was investigating Loyalists in Delaware when he received a historic dispatch from McKean.
On July 1, 1776, Rodney received a letter from Philadelphia in Dover, Del. The Continental Congress had scheduled a vote for the very next day, July 2, on the proposal from Virginian Richard Henry Lee that “these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states.”
The story goes on from there, and it’s good, eye-opening stuff—the sort of tale that neatly encapsulates American exceptionalism and the personalities, courage, and derring-do that made our fallen nation what it once was, all in one nifty little package.
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