What if Pennsylvania and Delaware remained one colony?

Pennsylvania-wank? Someone please help me write this TL. Though, if you want to go Greater Pennsylvania, the trick is to have Cresap's War blow open, and have the royal decree go further. That would roll up Delaware, because then a lot more of Maryland would be divvied up.
 
Given that Jefferson's victory in PA in OTL in 1796 was extremely narrow,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Pennsylvania,_1796 could not the extra Federalist votes from the Delaware counties enable Adams to carry the state? Delaware was, famously, a Federalist stronghold in presidential elections; it chose Federalist electors even in 1820! (True, they voted for Monroe for president, but they voted for Federalist ex-Governor Daniel Rodney for VP.) Another odd thing about Delaware: Wilmington was the stronghold of the Democratic-Republicans, while the rural counties were staunchly Federalist. See my post at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/xr-nyxoCZVs/pip9IRoLX0UJ

Of course maybe the Delaware counties wouldn't be as Federalist in an ATL where they had always been part of Pennsylvania; one reason that Delaware was so strongly Federalist was that as a small state it thought it needed a strong central government to protect it. It was especially proud of being the first state to ratify the Constitution. This consideration might be different if Delaware had long been part of Pennsylvania. But other reasons for rural Delawareans being Federalist (e.g., religion) might still be there even if it was part of Pennsylvania. Thus, the Delaware counties could move Pennsylvania into the Federalist column in a close election.

Thanks. I didn't realise the popular vote had been preserved.

So 1800 is probably the first election to be affected.
 
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If these butterflies cause America collapses into a state similar to Argentina post-independence, than Pennsylvania with Delaware will be an even greater power. I imagine this would mean Pennsylvania also grabs the Eastern Shore of Maryland as well as that little bit of Virginia.

Anything that weakens the United States (like if France successfully develops Louisiana and limits the British to east of the Appalachians) is a gain for Pennsylvania, and keeping Delaware helps them. A 1703 POD is early enough for quite a few thing to happen in colonial North America.
 
The point, though, is that the slavery issue was not important in why Delaware became separated from Pennsylvania. "In William Penn's Frame of Government of 1682, he established a combined assembly for his domain by providing for equal membership from each county and requiring legislation to have the assent of both the Lower Counties and the Upper Counties of Chester, Philadelphia and Bucks. The assembly meeting place alternated between Philadelphia and New Castle. Once Philadelphia began to grow, its leaders resented having to go to New Castle and gain agreement of the assemblymen from the sparsely populated Lower Counties. In 1704 members of the two regions mutually agreed to meet and pass laws separately from then on. The Lower Counties did continue to share a governor, but the Province of Pennsylvania never merged with the Lower Counties." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Delaware After 1704, complete separation was pretty much inevitable once there would be no more royal governor. They were separate colonies and it was logical for them to become separate states. In 1776, when the "Delaware state" was formed, slavery was legal in Pennsylvania as well as Delaware--and it was far from clear that it would not be gradually abolished in Delaware as it was in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. (In 1803, only the tie-breaking vote of the speaker of the state House of Representatives killed a gradual-emancipation bill; that was a year before New Jersey passed such a bill.)


Did PA vote by general ticket at that time? I had thought it voted in districts. I know one of its votes went to Adams.
 
Did PA vote by general ticket at that time? I had thought it voted in districts. I know one of its votes went to Adams.

It voted by general ticket. I'll quote from an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:

***

(1) "Republican newspapers charged the Federalists with fraudulent voting
in Pennsylvania, where the popular vote was very close, and in one
Maryland district where four votes separated the two parties; but their
protests were unheeded." Eugene Roseboom and Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., *A
History of Presidential Elections (4th ed. 1979), p. 20. Considering that
Adams won 71 electoral votes and Jefferson 68, and that 70 electoral votes
constituted a majority, a very slight change of the vote in Maryland and
Pennsylvania could have elected Jefferson president--assuming that the
elected-by-four-votes elector in Maryland was *not* the one who cast his
vote for both Adams and Jefferson.

As for Pennsylvania, which unlike Maryland elected its electors at large,
("in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire by popular vote for a general ticket"
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a2_1_2-3s6.html), the
race is described as follows at
http://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=59540
"The PA vote was razor-tight, with many precincts and three counties not
reporting. Other precincts and counties were challenged. The Governor
tried to collect all the returns but finally had to give up and certify
the 98% of the vote that he had in hand: a Jefferson victory with 50.2% of
the vote, good for a 13-2 electoral vote win." Had the race been a little
more in Jefferson's favor, the one Adams elector (I mean the one Adams
elector who actually voted for Adams--see below...) might have been
defeated.

The Republicans, in any event, do not seem to have pressed the "fraud"
argument. (After all, the Pennsylvania results had been certified by
Governor Mifflin, a respected moderate "who avoided commitment to any
party but leaned toward the Jeffersonians."
http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/bah/pahist/civil.asp?secid=31) "Jefferson
symbolized the mood of reconciliation by visiting Adams and pledging his
strong support. Even Jarvis, an ardent pro-Republican editor in Boston,
pronounced himself reconciled to Adams' election on the grounds that it
was impossible for the new President to be worse than Washington." Page
Smith, "The Election of 1796" in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Fred L.
Israel and William P. Hansen (eds) *History of American Presidential
Elections 1789-1968, Volume I 1789-1824* (New York: Chelsea House
Publishers 1985), p. 73.

(2) "A second [Pennsylvania] elector, reputedly a Federalist, voted for
Pinckney and Jefferson" according to Roseboom and Eckes. Obviously, the
defeat of *this* elector would not have helped Jefferson. I'm not sure
what motivated this first "faithless elector," Samuel Miles, the former
Mayor of Philadelphia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Miles Could
he have been an anyone-but-Adams Hamiltonian? Or on the contrary, so
ultra-moderate a Federalist that he didn't think Jefferson was so bad? In
any event, while there may have been a "13-2 electoral vote win" for the
*Republicans* in Pennsylvania, there was a 14-1 electoral vote victory for
*Jefferson.* An angry Pennsylvania voter wrote to the *Gazette of the
United States*: "What, do I choose Samuel Miles to determine for me
whether John Adams or Thomas Jefferson shall be President? No! I choose
him to act, not to think."
http://www.fairvote.org/e_college/faithless.htm)

BTW, this was not the last time that a state choosing electors at large
would nevertheless split its electoral vote (even without "faithless
electors"). In very close elections during the nineteenth century, it
sometimes happened that the most popular candidate for elector for the
otherwise losing presidential candidate in a state got a few more votes
than the least popular candidate for elector for the otherwise winning
presidential candidate. This may be the explanation of why one Adams
elector (leaving aside the "faithless" Miles) did manage to get elected.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/gylFcseS-_0/L2Ow9SbiV5YJ
 
I've neverimagined why little Delaware became its own state clearly it would be better off Pennsylvanian.
That suggests to me you've never been to Delaware. I'll grant that the northernmost reaches of New Castle County, DE, are all but indistinguishable from neighboring Delaware and Chester Counties in PA, but get more than a few miles-if that!-away from the arc border and it's clearly distinct. And below the C & D canal...that area has next to nothing in common with southeastern PA. Had the three counties not become separate, they would have been little more than an afterthought, constantly chafing at the government in Philadelphia or Harrisburg, not unlike Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
 
That suggests to me you've never been to Delaware. I'll grant that the northernmost reaches of New Castle County, DE, are all but indistinguishable from neighboring Delaware and Chester Counties in PA, but get more than a few miles-if that!-away from the arc border and it's clearly distinct. And below the C & D canal...that area has next to nothing in common with southeastern PA. Had the three counties not become separate, they would have been little more than an afterthought, constantly chafing at the government in Philadelphia or Harrisburg, not unlike Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Pennsylvania is a pretty diverse state. They'd find a lot in common with the Pennsyltucky parts of the state with regards to complaints of funding priorities.
 
Pennsylvania is a pretty diverse state. They'd find a lot in common with the Pennsyltucky parts of the state with regards to complaints of funding priorities.

"Pennsyltucky" is a much pithier way of saying "outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is Alabama without the black people politically". I can dig it.

...except Delaware south of the C&D Canal does have the blacks. But the analogy can only go so far.
 
Maine was added to balance Missouri, not Delaware. Missouri was even held up for a year to wait for Maine, which is why the seal for the state of Missouri has the wrong year.
 
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