Analysis: Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
"Analysis: Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania" explores the influential writings of John Dickinson, often referred to as the "Penman of the Revolution." Dickinson's twelve letters, published in the late 1760s, served as a crucial rallying point for colonial opposition to British taxation and regulation. Through his pseudonymous persona as "a Farmer," Dickinson articulated grievances against British policies, arguing that new tax laws violated the American right to self-governance and constituted a dangerous overreach of parliamentary power. He emphasized the historical precedent of a power-sharing arrangement between the colonies and Britain, advocating for the colonies' authority to impose taxes and govern local affairs.
These letters not only resonated with contemporary readers in the American colonies but also gained attention in Europe, positioning Dickinson as a key figure in the buildup to the American Revolution. By framing the tax debate within the context of constitutional rights and historical liberty, Dickinson's arguments transcended mere protest; they laid the groundwork for a broader discourse on American identity and autonomy. Overall, Dickinson's work represents a significant moment in the intellectual underpinnings of the American independence movement, advocating for a balanced approach to governance that recognizes both colonial rights and the role of the British Parliament.
Analysis: Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
Date: December 7, 1767
Author: Dickinson, John
Genre: newspaper essay
Summary Overview
Historians have called John Dickinson of Pennsylvania the “Penman of the Revolution” for his writings during the Revolutionary era. In the two decades before independence, he wrote most of the major tracts and petitions at the First and Second Continental Congress, several pamphlets articulating colonial grievances, and the Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (also known as Farmer’s Letters), his most well-known and influential piece. Writing under a pseudonym “a Farmer,” these twelve letters first appeared in colonial newspapers in 1767 and 1768, after which they were released in pamphlet form. They were published in all thirteen colonies and throughout Europe, and they became one of the most significant pro-independence publications of the day, second only to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in 1776. Farmer’sLetters united the colonies against Britain by providing a cogent explanation as to why British tax policies robbed Americans of their rights and liberties. In addition, they raised serious constitutional questions about what powers the colonies had in the empire and what powers the British had. Farmer’sLetters made Dickinson the face of the American protest movement.
Document Analysis
Colonial pamphleteers often used pseudonyms to hide their identities, especially if they were writing something controversial. Calling himself a “Pennsylvania Farmer,” John Dickinson’s essay collection Letters from a Farmerin Pennsylvania was indeed controversial. The text of “Letter II” represents his attempt to clarify the British Constitution and to expose Britain’s tax policies as a new and dangerous innovation over the colonies. When Parliament passed a series of acts in the 1760s, beginning first with the Sugar Act in 1764 and concluding with the Townshend Acts in 1767, Dickinson believed that these acts robbed Americans of the right of self-government and were thus unconstitutional intrusions of American rights and liberties.
In “Letter II,” which is the second of twelve letters first published in the PennsylvaniaChronicle in late 1767 and early 1768, Dickinson asserts that the new taxes impinged on the colonists’ right to self-government. He makes this argument by appealing to history, challenging Parliament’s claim that it was sovereign in all aspects in the empire, including the right to tax its overseas colonies. For Dickinson, it is a matter of sovereignty—who can tax and by what authority. In the eighteenth century British jurists defined sovereignty as the final, supreme, unqualified authority. This meant that power had to be lodged in Parliament, which the king had vested with governing power to administer the affairs of the empire. But Dickinson challenges that assertion, contending that the fundamental powers of sovereignty are not concentrated in Parliament alone, but divided equally with the colonies in a unique power-sharing arrangement that had existed since the first settlements were established in 1607. For nearly two centuries, Dickinson posits, Americans have exercised complete control over all matters of local government in the colonies, while British imperial officials handled all matters of external concern over the colonies. Americans have administered justice through common-law courts and customs, maintained law and order through their local, law-enforcing constabularies, and most of all, taxed themselves through their own self-appointed representatives. For their part, British officials have reviewed colonial legislation through a Board of Trade, levied moneys in the form of customs duties to regulate colonial commerce, and administered full and complete control over the military and foreign policy in the empire. Dickinson’s point in “Letter II” is that the empire has always operated according to federal principles, despite claims by Parliament that its power cannot be divided.
For Dickinson, then, Parliament has the authority to regulate trade in its overseas dominions because it had always done so. It is therefore appropriate for Parliament to impose duties on colonial trade because those taxes “were always imposed with design to restrain the commerce of one part, that was injurious to another,” which promoted “the general welfare in the empire,” Dickinson writes. But after 1763, with the Sugar, Stamp, and Townshend Acts, Parliament had exceeded its authority. It was not imposing taxes for the purposes of regulating trade in the empire but to raise a revenue to pay off a war debt. Imperial officials have done this, Dickinson laments, not to manage colonial trade “but for the single purpose of levying money on us,” which he calls “a most dangerous innovation.”
This dangerous innovation had thus violated a decades-old constitutional practice in which British American colonists taxed themselves to raise revenue for Great Britain. To underscore the point, Dickinson appeals to history to bolster his claim, calling his “dear countryman” to unite and resist Parliament’s unconstitutional and oppressive taxes. He focuses on manufacturing. Except for linens, which the colonists could still import from Ireland, Parliament forbade the colonies from exporting their manufactured items or importing goods that were not from Great Britain. This policy, Dickinson decries, has made the colonies “a city besieged.” “If Great Britain can order us to come to her for necessaries we want, and can order us to pay what taxes she pleases before we take them away, or when we land them here, we are as abject slaves as France and Poland.”
Dickinson’s comparison of Americans to slaves is a careful choice. Throughout Farmer’s Letters and particularly in “Letter II,” he frequently alludes to slaves and slavery to characterize the colonists’ condition. Dickinson is part of a generation of Americans who read widely in British Whig literature. Among the authors he frequently cites are two British writers, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, whose Cato’s Letters (1720–23), condemning the corruption of King George I, taught Dickinson about the dangers of tyrannical government. Dickinson also read John Locke, the popular English philosopher whose writings demonstrated a connection between taxes and property, consent and representation. Locke wrote that when government leaders issue taxes on people without their consent, they become slaves to the government.
Dickinson appropriates this language but goes a step further. For him, slavery means more than Parliament coercing the colonies into paying taxes and depriving them of their property. It also relegates them to a status similar to other disenfranchised people in the Atlantic world who pay taxes without their consent, including women, children, free blacks, poor whites, and others who could not vote in the eighteenth-century British Empire but had to pay taxes anyway.
Dickinson further illustrates the danger of British tax policies by appealing to a dramatic episode in history, in which he draws examples from the ancient world to argue that Parliament has no right to tax the colonists on goods they were forced to import from Britain. He remarks that when the Carthaginians possessed the island of Sardinia, they passed a decree declaring that Sardinians could only get corn from the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians, Dickinson claims, then imposed exorbitant duties on the corn, draining Sardinians of “any sums they pleased.” When the Sardinians protested these harsh and oppressive duties, their warlike oppressors “starved them to death” and made them suffer unspeakable cruelties. Dickinson’s point is clear: unless his “countryman” unite against corrupt British policies, they would experience a similar fate as the Sardinians. The British government will deprive them of their money and set a precedent that would eventually destroy them financially.
Dickinson’s rhetoric is forceful but not treasonous. He does not advocate a separation from Great Britain in 1767, the year he began writing Farmer’s Letters. He views himself as a proud British subject. He has read widely in British history and literature and has studied law at the Inns of Court in London. Moreover, by 1767 he has already served in colonial politics for nearly a decade. He understands the British Constitution. He zealously advocates for British rights and liberties. What he wants is for Parliament to recognize the Constitution he reveres and loves. Consequently, his protests in “Letter II” also express his affection for the empire. He sees the colonies as “but parts of a whole” in this far-reaching and powerful empire. He believes that there has to be “some power to preside and preserve” the connection between the colonies and Great Britain. He ascribes that power to Parliament because it can regulate trade in the empire and prevent one dominion from levying excessive duties at the expense of another.
But he does not believe Parliament can tax for revenue purposes. It would set a dangerous precedent and thereby rob the colonists of a longstanding constitutional practice where they had taxed themselves. If Parliament “can legally take money out of our pockets without our consent,” Dickinson affirms, then colonial liberty would be nothing more than a sham. It would be “vox et praetera nihil,” a Latin phrase which he translated as “a sound and nothing else.”
Dickinson’s taxation-regulation distinction seems tenuous at best since it was impossible for American colonists to determine what would be taxed for revenue and what would be taxed for trade, but that was presumably not the point. Dickinson’s argument seems to be that British history has demonstrated that all duties previously imposed in the empire were not for the purposes of raising revenue but only for regulating trade. This was true with the Navigation Acts Parliament passed in the 1660s, and it is also true, Dickinson reasons, for Americans living in Britain’s thirteen mainland colonies.
In advancing this position, Dickinson is the first of a long line of protest writers to invoke the historic rights of British subjects in a defense of the rights and liberties of American colonists. Whereas other writers would refer to natural rights’ principles, claiming that the taxes constituted an assault on colonists’ property, Dickinson advances a legalistic view of the taxes and thus offers a way to end the imperial crisis. He sees that if Parliament could accept its long history of sharing power with the colonies, then it might renounce its policies and implement reforms allowing the colonists to govern themselves.
When Dickinson first advanced these ideas in 1767, critics quickly assailed them for placing formal, constitutional limitations on Great Britain’s sovereignty by dividing what was supposed to be indivisible. However, he also had supporters. For example, when the wealthy Boston merchant and later signer of the Declaration of IndependenceJohn Hancock read Farmer’s Letters, he immediately made arrangements to visit Philadelphia so as to hear more from Dickinson.
Historian David Ramsay, writing in the eighteenth century, said that American colonists avidly read Farmer’s Letters and extolled them as the best defense of American rights and liberties. Farmer’s Letters was published in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston, as well as in smaller cities. Across the Atlantic, they were published in London, Paris, Dublin, and Amsterdam. In addition, they went through multiple editions in pamphlet form, spanning as far east as Hartford and Boston and as far south as Williamsburg and Charleston.
What did the British ministry think of Farmer’s Letters? The general consensus seems to have been that Dickinson was responsible for stirring up rebellion and revolution in the colonies. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that Dickinson’s home was torched by the redcoats—a fate that was not shared by other prominent colonial leaders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Farmer’sLetters, then, made Dickinson the de facto leader of the protest movement and one of the most important American voices in the decade before independence. Clearly written and effectively argued, the Farmer’s Letters, especially “Letter II,” helped to unite Americans against British imperial policies they deemed unjust and unfair. What is even more important is that Farmer’s Letters provided a principled appeal explaining why Americans had the right to tax themselves.
Bibliography
Calvert, Jane E. Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson. New York: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.
Flower, Milton E. John Dickinson, Conservative Revolutionary. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1983. Print.
Jacobson, David L. John Dickinson and the Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1764–1776. Berkeley: U of California P, 1965. Print.
Kaestle, Carl F. “The Public Reaction to John Dickinson’s Farmer’s Letters.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 78.2 (1968): 323–53. Print.
Stillé, Charles, and Paul Leicester Ford. The Life and Writings of John Dickinson. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Hist. Soc. of Pennsylvania, 1891–1895. Print.