Fifty Miles Through a Thunderstorm

Caesar Rodney left Dover on the evening of June 27, 1776, summoned by Thomas McKean: the independence vote was coming, Delaware's delegation was split — McKean yes, Read no — and without Rodney, Delaware would be deadlocked.

Fifty miles. Through a thunderstorm. He arrived at the State House still in his riding clothes, wearing the green silk scarf over the cancerous growth on his face.

He voted yes.

What Rodney understood was not complicated: the vote mattered, Delaware's vote mattered, and he was the only person who could cast it correctly. He had been managing the cancer for years and had made his calculations about the time he had left and what to do with it.

He served as President of Delaware 1778–1781, organizing the state's war effort from Dover while his health declined. He died in 1784, two years before the Constitutional Convention, never seeing the nation whose independence he had ridden through a thunderstorm to secure. His face appears on the Delaware quarter — the green scarf visible — which means more Americans have seen his portrait than know his name.