John Dickinson

President

• Born: November 8, 1732
• Birthplace: Crosiadore Plantation, Maryland
• Died: February 14, 1808
• Place of death: Wilmington, Delaware

American legal scholar and politician

At a crucial point in the development of the American Revolution, Dickinson stated the colonists’ arguments against England in a new and compelling way and became, for a while, a spokesman for all the colonies. Later, he helped draft and win ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

Areas of achievement Government and politics, law

Early Life

John Dickinson was born on a plantation in Maryland that had been in his family for three quarters of a century. Eight years later, John’s father, Samuel, moved his family to Delaware, where he hired an Irish tutor named William Killen to teach his children classics and history. Samuel Dickinson was a lawyer as well as a gentleman farmer, and Killen, too, was attracted to the law (he later became chief justice of Delaware), so it is not surprising that the young John Dickinson chose law as a career.

When he was eighteen years old, John Moland, one of Philadelphia’s leading attorneys, accepted Dickinson as a student. The three years that he spent in Moland’s office introduced him to a much wider world than he had known before, and he began to meet other young men who would become important in revolutionary Pennsylvania and Delaware. His fellow students in Moland’s office, for example, included Samuel Wharton and George Read.

To complete his legal training, Dickinson left America in 1753 to study at the Inns of Court in London. Five years later, he returned to Philadelphia and opened his own law office. A bookish and intelligent man, he was apparently as interested in studying and writing history, especially English constitutional history, as he was in trying cases. Nevertheless, he quickly became one of the most successful lawyers in the city. A portrait of him done years later reveals a man with the somewhat portly build typical of successful men in the eighteenth century. His mental abilities, his training, and his understanding of history and constitutional law, however, were anything but typical.

The popular, talented, and wealthy young attorney soon ran for office and won election to the Delaware legislature in 1760. Two years later, he became a delegate to the Pennsylvania Assembly, representing Philadelphia, where he opposed Joseph Galloway and Benjamin Franklin in their attempts to have King George III convert Pennsylvania from a proprietary colony ruled by the Penn family to a royal colony run by a royal governor. Dickinson had little love for the Penns, whom he (and most Pennsylvanians) regarded as a particularly rapacious clan, much too prone to place their own welfare above the public good. Yet Dickinson thought the remedy Franklin proposed would make things worse, for it would strip Pennsylvanians of the protection that their proprietary charter afforded them from direct royal (and parliamentary) interference in their affairs.

Dickinson’s stand was not popular, and he lost his seat at the next election. On the sidelines and out of public favor, he began to write about the emerging struggle between the colonies and England. That struggle would change Dickinson’s life and career and led him away from the practice of law toward a life of revolutionary politics and public service.

Life’s Work

In 1765, John Dickinson published the pamphlet The Late Regulations Respecting the British Colonies on the Continent of America Considered. In it, he denounced both the Sugar Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765) as ill-advised and economically senseless attempts by Parliament to raise revenues in the American colonies. The popular pamphlet made Dickinson one of Pennsylvania’s leading opponents of the stamp tax, and so when the legislature chose delegates to attend the Stamp Act Congress in New York, Dickinson was among them. That congress so closely reflected the cautious Dickinson’s views, and so respected his talents as a constitutional scholar and essayist, that it permitted him to draft its formal resolutions. In them, Dickinson stated the colonies’ objections to the Stamp Act but avoided any suggestion that colonists ought to resist the law until it was (as the congress hoped it would be) repealed.

Parliament did repeal the Stamp Act in 1766, but soon a new threat to colonial liberties arose when England again tried to raise a revenue in the colonies. The Townshend Revenue Act of 1767 imposed taxes on English goods imported into the colonies. In December, 1767, Dickinson began publishing in the Pennsylvania Chronicle a series of letters signed “A Farmer in Pennsylvania” that opposed the Townshend taxes. Dickinson was not a farmer in Pennsylvania, but was a lawyer in Philadelphia. Yet the overwhelming majority of colonists (90 percent or more) lived in rural areas, not cities, and were not likely to be much impressed by “Letters from a Philadelphia Lawyer.” Dickinson wisely chose a more appealing pen name. In any case, that he was the “Pennsylvania farmer” quickly became public knowledge.

In the “farmer’s letters,” as they came to be called, Dickinson accomplished two things. First, he summarized and stated the colonists’ claim that English attempts to tax them were not merely inexpedient and ill-advised, but were flatly unconstitutional—and he summarized that claim more clearly and succinctly than any colonist before. “It is inseparably essential to the freedom of a people,” he wrote at the Stamp Act Congress and repeated in Letter IV, “that NO TAX be imposed on them, except with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives.” Second, he pointed out that the form of any tax England attempted to lay upon American colonists to raise revenues was irrelevant. What mattered in deciding if a tax was or was not constitutional was the purpose for which it had been passed. If England taxed, for example, colonial imports to restrict American trade with foreign nations, then the purpose of that tax was primarily to regulate trade—and few colonists, and certainly not Dickinson, as yet challenged England’s right to regulate the colonies’ trade. If England laid a tax on colonial imports to raise money, however (as it did in the Townshend Act), then the tax was unconstitutional. Dickinson added that it was the colonists’ right to determine for themselves what Parliament’s intent had been in passing any colonial tax.

The “farmer’s letters” were immensely popular. Nearly every colonial newspaper published them. A pamphlet version appeared in Philadelphia in 1768 and was republished at least six times in other American cities, while editions also came out in London, Paris, and Dublin. When most colonial assemblies endorsed Dickinson’s ideas, he became the first American who could, with some justice, claim to speak for the American colonies, rather than for only a few of them. In the letters, Dickinson laid the foundation for an emerging sense of American “nationality” among the colonists. He brought much closer the day when colonists would think of themselves not as New Yorkers or Virginians or Rhode Islanders first, but as one people, sharing common ideas, interests, and goals. This was the most important contribution of the letters to the developing American Revolution and to the nation it created.

For a while, Dickinson was the most popular individual in the colonies. Praised by town meetings, toasted by county committees, honored by legislatures, Dickinson found himself hailed from Massachusetts to Georgia. In the letters, he had staked out the most advanced constitutional ground and had placed himself at the cutting edge of the incipient revolution against England. Dickinson’s exceptional popularity, however, did not last. He opposed, publicly and often, any open resistance to English law and especially any violent resistance. Perhaps influenced by his family’s Quaker heritage, he held to that opinion, insisting that conciliation, patience, and petitions, along with trade boycotts, were the proper means of changing England’s mind even after the Tea Act and the Boston Tea Party. Not even the passage of the Coercive (Intolerable) Acts, the imposition by England of martial law in Massachusetts and the military occupation of Boston, changed his mind. By the spring of 1775, Dickinson was being denounced for his caution as a Loyalist sympathizer and a coward throughout much of New England, while many ardent rebels in Pennsylvania became suspicious, if not of his loyalty, then at least of the depth of his commitment to the rebel cause.

By late 1774 even Dickinson knew that war might be unavoidable and that the colonists had best prepare for the worst even as they tried to avoid it. He served that year as a Pennsylvania delegate to the First Continental Congress, as chairman of his colony’s Committee of Safety and Defense and as colonel of the first battalion of revolutionary militia raised in Philadelphia. Yet even after the war began at Lexington in April, 1775, Dickinson still sought a peaceful resolution of the troubles between England and the colonies, and he still refused to support a declaration of American independence. In December, 1775, for example, after eight months of war, Dickinson arranged to have Pennsylvania’s delegation to the 1776 Continental Congress (which included himself) forbidden by the Assembly to consider independence at Congress.

By the end of 1775, Dickinson had come to fear what England’s armies might do to America in a revolutionary war declared too soon, without sufficient preparation, planning, and unity and without a single guarantee of foreign assistance. He also worried about what colonists might do to themselves during and after such a war. Dickinson was well aware of the jealousies and antagonisms among colonists that had characterized most of colonial history, problems that had not dissolved when the war began. He worried that thirteen petty, independent states might eventually make war on one another, and that anarchy or tyranny might follow. He worried, in short, that the liberties that colonists were fighting to preserve might be destroyed by the revolution intended to secure them. Thus, when Congress took a preliminary vote on independence on July 1, 1776, Dickinson spoke eloquently in opposition and voted no. When the final vote came the next morning, however, it was clear that independence would pass overwhelmingly, so Dickinson abstained; he took no part in the vote that finally, after fifteen months of war, declared the American colonies free and independent states.

Dickinson still had misgivings about the revolution following independence, especially when Congress rejected his draft of a proposed constitution for the new nation, which would have created a relatively strong central government. Instead, Congress adopted articles of confederation that left most significant powers in the hands of the separate states. Widely suspected of being a lukewarm rebel at best, his advice ignored by Congress, and his seat there taken from him by the end of 1776, Dickinson withdrew from public life for a time, resigning his commission and his place in the legislature.

In 1779, however, Dickinson returned to Congress as a delegate from Delaware. Two years later, he became president of that state’s Supreme Executive Council, and he soon won the same post in Pennsylvania, although he despised the state’s radical revolutionary constitution. His troubled experience as president of the council merely reinforced his conviction that the states and the nation could neither survive nor prosper without stronger, more stable governments.

When Delaware chose him as a delegate to the federal Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, Dickinson accepted. He took an active part in the convention’s deliberations and played an important role in arranging the compromises among the various factions represented there (and particularly between the large and small states) that made any agreement on a new national constitution possible. Never as ardent an advocate of national government power (as opposed to state power) as James Madison or Alexander Hamilton, Dickinson nevertheless worked at the convention to create a more vigorous central government than existed under the Articles of Confederation.

After the convention presented the new national Constitution to the states for their approval, Dickinson wrote a series of letters signed “Fabius,” which began appearing in newspapers in the fall of 1787. They urged ratification of the Constitution on the grounds that it would provide the stability of government that the ineffective Articles of Confederation manifestly had not, and so protect liberty, ensure the due power of each state within the Union, and guarantee stability. That done, he all but retired from public life, though he continued to follow public affairs closely and to express his opinions in letters and essays. When he died in February, 1808, he was seventy-six years old.

Significance

John Dickinson was, all of his life, cautious and conservative. In 1776, he did not so much embrace revolution as accept it when events left him no choice. Never much attracted by the possibilities that revolution offered to create new liberties, Dickinson instead feared the threat revolution posed to liberties he already enjoyed, liberties solidly grounded in English history, law, and tradition. The “farmer’s letters” united the colonists behind a single constitutional doctrine in opposition to England, a necessary condition for independence and an American nation. At the same time, Dickinson upheld the power of law, peaceful persuasion, and public discourse as the proper means by which colonists might see their grievances redressed.

As late as July, 1776, Dickinson opposed the Declaration of Independence, which his own writings had helped make inevitable. Yet once his fellow colonists chose to establish a new nation, he stood with them. Once he understood, as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and others did before him, that the fact of imminent tyranny outweighed the dangers of resistance and even independence, commitment to the revolution did not waver. He spent the remainder of his public life helping to secure independence and working to prevent the liberties he valued from being consumed by the revolution or undermined in its aftermath. At the federal Constitutional Convention of 1787, he worked to enhance the power of the central government without unduly limiting the autonomy of the states. Once a stable national frame of government had been agreed upon at Philadelphia, Dickinson campaigned to have it accepted by the states. After ratification, with the republic safe, at least for a while, Dickinson retired to his home in Delaware as one of the founders of a new republic in a world of monarchies.

Bibliography

Berkin, Carol. A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution. New York: Harcourt, 2002. Recounts the events of the Constitutional Convention, featuring information on Dickinson’s role in the proceedings. Includes an appendix with short biographies of convention delegates.

Bradford, M. E. Founding Fathers: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitution. 2d rev. ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994. A five-page biography of Dickinson is included among the biographies of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Examines the delegates’ constitutional theories and visions for a new nation.

Dickinson, John, and Richard Henry Lee. Empire and Nation: Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania; Letters from the Federal Farmer. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Contains the text of all the “farmer’s letters.” Forrest McDonald’s introduction is useful for putting the letters in context.

Flower, Milton E. John Dickinson, Conservative Revolutionary. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983. The first full biography of Dickinson since 1891 and the only one readily available. Scholarly and not particularly easy reading. Flower portrays Dickinson in the usual manner, as a conservative, and offers few new insights. Yet Flower provides far more, and more accurate, information about Dickinson than any other single source.

Jacobson, David L. John Dickinson and the Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1764-1776. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965. Not a full biography. Scholarly yet surprisingly readable. Treats Dickinson as less conservative than do most historians.

Jensen, Merrill. The Articles of Confederation: An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 1774-1781. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959. Includes a detailed account of Dickinson’s draft of articles of confederation submitted to Congress shortly after independence. Chapter 4 deals exclusively with Dickinson’s draft. Places the Articles of Confederation and the debate over them within the larger context of the revolution. Though somewhat dated, the book is still useful for understanding Dickinson and the political climate in which he lived.

Van Doren, Carl C. The Great Rehearsal: The Story of the Making and Ratifying of the Constitution of the United States. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. Originally published in 1948, this nicely written, largely narrative account provides a good background for understanding Dickinson’s role at the federal Constitutional Convention and in the ensuing ratification debates.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Eighteenth Century

Great Events from History: The Eighteenth Century, 1701-1800: 1712: Stamp Act; March 22, 1765-March 18, 1766: Stamp Act Crisis; June 29, 1767-April 12, 1770: Townshend Crisis; December 16, 1773: Boston Tea Party; September 5-October 26, 1774: First Continental Congress; April 19, 1775: Battle of Lexington and Concord; July 4, 1776: Declaration of Independence; March 1, 1781: Ratification of the Articles of Confederation; September 17, 1787: U.S. Constitution Is Adopted.