“Aside from its tradition of self-interestedness, Delaware has historically distinguished itself primarily by its retrograde approaches to race, political reform, and the administration of justice. In 1798 it effectively barred blacks—slave or free—from even entering a county seat on Election Day. As residents of the last Union state to ban slavery, most Delawareans sympathized with the Confederacy, and its senators attacked President Abraham Lincoln as a “monster” (in the words of one) and a “despot” and “weak and imbecile man” (in the words of the other). Despite siding with the Union during the Civil War, the legislature earmarked funds to assist drafted men seeking to buy their way out of military service—reflecting either its affinity for the Confederacy or its general support for the principle of shirking one’s patriotic obligations. Its political parties spent much of the late nineteenth century accusing each other (falsely, alas) of supporting black equality. Delaware voted against the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which freed the slaves and gave them the vote and equal protection. It retained its Jim Crow laws into the 1960s, yet, perhaps due to its puniness, managed to escape the disrepute given to segregationist contemporaries like Alabama or Mississippi.

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Delaware also set itself apart through its fondness for medieval forms of punishment. It was not until the early 1900s that Delaware became the last state in the Union to abolish the pillory, a twelfth-century torture device. (The pillory resembled the stocks, but it was even crueler in that it forced the convict to stand, with his neck craned at what drawings indicate to be a highly uncomfortable angle.) In addition, Delaware achieved minor notoriety as the last state to ban public whipping. Connecticut renounced the practice in 1828, Pennsylvania in 1790. Delaware, by contrast, flogged its last convict in 1952.”