Delaware

On the night of July 1, 1776, a man with facial cancer rode roughly 70 miles through a thunderstorm on horseback to cast a single vote. His name was Caesar Rodney, and he was one of Delaware's three delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

The other two couldn't agree. Thomas McKean wanted independence from Britain, but George Read didn't. Without Rodney, Delaware's vote was stuck.

Rodney rode all night from Dover and showed up the next morning, still in his muddy boots and spurs. He broke the tie, and Delaware voted for independence.

The Lenape people had lived along the river and bay for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. In 1638, Swedish settlers built Fort Christina near present-day Wilmington, the first permanent European settlement in the Delaware Valley. The Dutch took it in 1655, and the English seized control less than a decade later.

On December 7, 1787, Delaware became the very first state to ratify the Constitution. That's where it gets its nickname, the First State.

But freedom didn't come equally here. Delaware stayed in the Union during the Civil War, and by 1860 more than 90% of its Black residents were already free.

Yet the state voted against the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery across the entire country, in 1865. Delaware didn't officially ratify it until 1901.

A Wilmington Quaker named Thomas Garrett didn't wait for politicians to do the right thing. He ran an Underground Railroad station out of his hardware store and helped roughly 2,700 enslaved people escape to freedom.

He worked closely with Harriet Tubman, who stopped at his home on many of her rescue missions. A federal court fined him and took nearly everything he owned. He kept going.

You can take a ferry to Fort Delaware on Pea Patch Island, a Civil War prison camp that held about 33,000 Confederate prisoners over the course of the war. In Wilmington, tour the Hagley Museum to see where the DuPont family started making gunpowder on the Brandywine River.

Walk the mile-long boardwalk at Rehoboth Beach and ride the old-school rides at Funland. In May or June, head to the Delaware Bay shore and watch thousands of horseshoe crabs crawl ashore to spawn, the same ritual they've performed for 450 million years.