He also wanted to offset the ambitions of Lord Baltimore to
extend Maryland northward. Penn accordingly persuaded his friend
James, the Duke of York, to give him a grant of Delaware, which
Penn thereupon annexed to Pennsylvania under the name of the
Territories or Three Lower Counties. The three counties, New
Castle, Kent, and Sussex,* are still the counties of Delaware,
each one extending across the State and filling its whole length
from the hills of the Brandywine on the Pennsylvania border to
the sands of Sussex at Cape Henlopen. The term "Territory" has
ever since been used in America to describe an outlying province
not yet given the privileges of a State. Instead of townships,
the three Delaware counties were divided into "hundreds," an old
Anglo-Saxon county method of division going back beyond the times
of Alfred the Great. Delaware is the only State in the Union that
retains this name for county divisions. The Three Lower Counties
were allowed to send representatives to the Pennsylvania
Assembly; and the Quakers of Delaware have always been part of
the Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia.
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