John Dickinson

I've been reading recently THE FOUNDERS ON THE FOUNDERS which, as the title suggests, is a collection of the sometimes snippy (though sometimes admiring) things the founders of the United States had to say about each other before the writers of pious histories got a hold of them.

The editor of this book is John P. Kaminski, the founder and director of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution, the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It was published by the University of Virginia, 2008.

I was reminded by this book of one of my long-standing objections to the stage musical, and the movie, 1776.

That drama gives John Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, all the dramatic Tory speeches about how wonderful it is to be a subject to the Crown. He is the foil of Adams, etc. You would never guess it, from any production thereof, that Dickinson had been a firebrand of anti-tax agitation in the earlier stages of the disputes that led to their being such a thing as a Continental Congress, that led to their being a revolution.

Dickinson was best known before independence as the author of LETTERS FROM A PENNSYLVANIA FARMER (1768). It may have been Dickinson who coined the phrase "no taxation without representation" as the summation of American colonial grievances.

Dickinson had in mind something like the British Commonwealth that later developed. The colonials should be able to tax themselves, and in general govern themselves, he thought, through their own representative assemblies, although some empire-wide regulatory powers should be left to the Parliament in London, and all colonists should remain subjects of the same King.

Dickinson had been raised a Quaker, and knowing that, one is perhaps not surprised that once the fighting began at Lexington, he was no longer a firebrand, but rather a voice within the Congress for keeping lines of communication with the monarchy open, keeping alive the change for a peaceful resolution.

THE FOUNDERS ON THE FOUNDERS has a fascinating section on Dickinson. On June 20, 1779, John Adams, who was then in Paris as an ambassador to the new nation's great ally, wrote in a diary entry that a Chevalier had asked him about Dickinson.

"I explained, as well as I could in French, the Inconsistency of the Farmers Letters and his perseverance in that Inconsistency in Congress. Mr Dickinson's Opposition to the declaration of Independency, I ventured as modestly as I could to let him know that I had the Honor to be the Principal Disputant in Congress upon that Great Question."

In 1808, though, after receiving news of Dickinson's death, Thomas Jefferson was quite sentimental. "Among the first of the advocates for the rights of his country when assailed by Great Britain ... his name will be consecrated in history as one of the great worthies of the Revolution."