Ride all night for independence

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 33 for his account.

On July 1, 1776, the Continental Congress voted on Richard Henry Lee’s resolution for independence, and the radicals got a rude shock. Pennsylvania and South Carolina voted no, and Delaware’s two delegates present split, Thomas McKean for and George Read against. The final vote was set for the next day, and McKean sent a hurried message to the third Delaware delegate, Caesar Rodney, eighty miles away in Dover. Rodney was a militia leader who had been putting down Tory trouble in southern Delaware. He was forty-seven and in the grip of a cancer on his face that he hid with a green scarf. A storm was breaking, and he got on his horse anyway. Rothbard says he rode all night in a thunderstorm from Dover to Philadelphia. By the morning of July 2 he was in the State House, in his boots and spurs, in time for the vote. He wrote his brother that, though “detained by Thunder and Rain,” he had arrived in Congress “time Enough to give my Voice in the matter of Independence.” Delaware’s tie was broken. South Carolina’s Edward Rutledge brought his delegation over, and Pennsylvania’s two opponents, John Dickinson and Robert Morris, stayed away so that its three remaining delegates carried it. Rothbard calls it energy: with one night’s ride, the vote that looked lost became unanimous.