to handle a good deal of correspondence and sign official documents. During his time in office, Lord Cornwallis's British army surrendered at Yorktown, which effectively ended the war. Government of Delaware Meanwhile, McKean led the effort in the General Assembly of Delaware to declare its separation from the British government, which it did on June 15, 1776. In August, he was elected to the special convention to draft a new state constitution. Upon hearing of it, McKean made the long ride to Dover, Delaware, from Philadelphia in a single day, went to a room in an inn, and that night, virtually by himself, drafted the document. It was adopted September 20, 1776. The Delaware Constitution of 1776 became the first state constitution to be produced after the Declaration of Independence. McKean was elected to Delaware's first House of Assembly for both the 1776–1777 and the 1778–1779 sessions, succeeding John McKinly as speaker on February 12, 1777, when McKinly became president of Delaware. Shortly after President McKinly's capture and imprisonment, McKean served as the president of Delaware for a month, from September 22 to October 20, 1777. That was the time needed for the successor George Read to return from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and to assume the duties. Immediately after the Battle of Brandywine, the British Army occupied Wilmington and much of northern New Castle County. Its navy also controlled the lower Delaware River and Delaware Bay. As a result, the state capital, New Castle, was unsafe as a meeting place, and the Sussex County seat, Lewes, was sufficiently disrupted by Loyalists that it was unable to hold a valid general election that autumn. As president, McKean was primarily occupied with recruitment of the militia and with keeping some semblance of civic order in the portions of the state still under his control. Government of Pennsylvania McKean started his long tenure as chief justice of Pennsylvania on July 28, 1777, and served in that capacity until 1799. There, he largely set the rules of justice for revolutionary Pennsylvania. According to the biographer John Coleman, "only the historiographical difficulty of reviewing court records and other scattered documents prevents recognition that McKean, rather than John Marshall, did more than anyone else to establish an independent judiciary in the United States. As chief justice under a Pennsylvania constitution he considered flawed, he assumed it the right of the court to strike down