Henry Draper Mortgage Bond and Warrant of Attorney

Partly printed and manuscript mortgage obligation and accompanying warrant of attorney signed by Henry Draper, Sussex County, Delaware, August 6, 1736. This substantial colonial Delaware legal instrument consists of a two-part loan transaction executed by Henry Draper of Sussex County, comprising a mortgage bond and a related warrant of attorney issued under the authority of the General Loan Office of Sussex County. Dated 6 August 1736, the documents record Draper's obligation to William Till, Gentleman, Trustee of the General Loan Office, in the principal sum of approximately £24 lawful money, secured by a mortgage on Draper's lands and tenements. Both portions bear Draper's large and boldly executed signature and were witnessed by Margaret Kollock and Jacob Kollock, members of one of Sussex County's prominent colonial families. The forms reflect a fascinating and now little-known aspect of colonial finance. During the eighteenth century, Delaware, like several other colonies, employed loan-office systems through which paper currency was issued and lent to inhabitants against mortgages on real property. Borrowers such as Draper received credit backed by land, while the colony benefited from the circulation of currency and the collection of interest payments. The printed language of the document specifically references the statute creating the General Loan Office, which had authority to emit bills of credit and appoint county trustees to administer the program. The first portion of the instrument is a standard mortgage obligation, binding Draper, his heirs, executors, and administrators to repay the loan with interest according to terms set forth in a contemporaneous mortgage indenture. The second document, addressed to Andrew Hamilton, attorney of the Court of Common Pleas for Sussex County, is a warrant authorizing confession of judgment in the event of default. Such warrants were common in colonial commercial practice, providing lenders with an efficient legal remedy should a borrower fail to meet his obligations. Together, the documents illustrate the intersection of public finance, private credit, and colonial legal procedure in mid-eighteenth-century Delaware. The association with William Till, Trustee of the General Loan Office, further underscores the governmental nature of the transaction. Rather than a private mortgage between individuals, this was effectively a loan issued through the colony's public credit system, demonstrating how provincial governments sought to stimulate economic activity and provide liquidity in an era when specie currency remained scarce. Although Henry Draper was not a nationally prominent figure, documents such as this are invaluable precisely because they illuminate the lives of ordinary colonial landholders who formed the economic backbone of British America. Draper appears to have been a resident freeholder of Sussex County, then one of the most rural and agricultural regions of the Delaware counties. His participation in the loan-office program suggests ownership of sufficient real estate to qualify as collateral under the colony's lending regulations. Borrowers like Draper represented the class of independent farmers and landowners whose productivity sustained the colonial economy. Through mortgages of this type they obtained access to credit for agricultural improvements, land purchases, equipment, livestock, or other necessities of rural enterprise. Such records provide rare surviving evidence of the financial lives of ordinary colonists and the mechanisms by which local economies functioned decades before the American Revolution. The document survives from a formative period in Delaware's history, nearly a quarter-century before independence. It offers a tangible connection to the colony's experimental use of paper money and government-backed credit, subjects of enduring interest to historians of early American finance. The combination of a mortgage obligation and warrant of attorney demonstrates the sophisticated legal and financial structures already operating in the colonies by the mid-eighteenth century. Equally noteworthy is the survival of the large autograph signatures, witness attestations, and manuscript insertions that personalize an otherwise printed legal form. These features transform the document from a routine administrative record into a vivid artifact of colonial economic life. As a result, this piece stands as an excellent example of Delaware colonial financial history: a rare and well-preserved loan-office mortgage that illustrates the practical workings of public credit, land security, and legal enforcement in pre-Revolutionary America.