An Event in History Not Taught in School: 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

The two Delaware delegates who were in Philadelphia at the time, McKean and Read, did not agree on whether to vote for the colonies’ independence. Read did not at the moment favor the vote for independence (although he would end up signing the Declaration), while McKean was in favor of it. Caesar Rodney was needed to break the Delaware delegates’ tie. Rodney was passionately devoted to the cause of American independence and, despite his habitual bad health, he determined to be in Philadelphia the next day to vote for that independence.

[1776 History] Rodney got on his horse and rode for eighteen straight hours and over eighty miles through thunder and rain to get to Philadelphia before the vote, a ride that usually took two days. He stopped only to change horses. As if straight out of a Hollywood movie, it is said that the other Congressional delegates heard the hoofbeats on the cobblestones outside the convention hall, and in came Caesar Rodney, near exhaustion, covered in mud, with spurs still attached, to break his state’s tie to vote in favor of independence.

Rodney might not have looked the part of a hero. Among his various physical ailments were a skin cancer that disfigured his face, and which he tried to hide with a green silk veil. But that day, at the Continental Congress, the asthmatic Delaware delegate was the crucial man, the hinge, the hero, the necessary vote deciding if America would be independent or no. Rodney arrived in time, Delaware voted for independence, and the rest, as they say, is history.

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