The Pennsylvania Farmer

John Dickinson does not fit on a bumper sticker. He was the kind of founder who made revolutions possible, then questioned whether a revolution should declare itself before it had the moral high ground, the money, and the allies to survive. He wrote like a lawyer and thought like a historian. He loved the English constitution even as he held a quill that would push Parliament back across the Atlantic. That is why he earned the nickname Penman of the Revolution. It is also why he puzzled hotheads in every age. Dickinson’s life is an answer to an uncomfortable question. What if the most conservative man in the room carried the most durable revolution in his head.

He began life with advantages that would have spoiled lesser men. John Dickinson was born at Crosiadore Plantation in Talbot County, Maryland, in November 1732, either on the eighth or the thirteenth depending on which family paper you trust. The date matters less than the setting. He came from wealth. His father, Samuel, had property and slaves in Maryland and Delaware. His mother, Mary Cadwalader, came from the respectable circles of Philadelphia with a strong Quaker streak. The family moved to Poplar Hall in Kent County, Delaware, around 1741. There the boy grew into a gentleman who learned the habits of ruling himself before he presumed to advise others. Tutors shaped him. William Killen, who later became Delaware’s first Chief Justice, trained Dickinson’s mind on languages, history, and the law. It showed for the rest of his life. When Dickinson wrote, he did not sermonize like a preacher or thunder like a pamphleteer. He argued from experience, precedent, and duty. He trusted history more than slogans. He believed the English constitution was not a wax nose to be bent by whatever ministry took office, but a body of inherited wisdom. He treated it as a standard. He measured abuses against that standard and asked readers to do the same.

At eighteen, he began legal study in Philadelphia under John Moland. Four years later he sailed for London to read law at the Middle Temple. That was the perfect classroom for a colonial who wanted to understand the mother country’s strengths and the empire’s blind spots. He watched Parliament and the courts. He saw how power moved and how men justified it. He learned the language of rights and the limits of those rights in real politics. He came home in 1757 with a trained legal mind and a steady hand. He already had something else, too. From his mother he had absorbed a religious sensibility that leaned Quaker even if he never formally joined the Society of Friends. He respected conscience, distrusted violence, and measured justice with a longer ruler than most of his contemporaries. That ruler would make him a leader of resistance in one decade and an opponent of a hasty declaration in the next. Haste, he believed, was the ally of tyranny because it made men exchange one set of masters for another without repairing the habits that keep liberty alive.

The comfortable truth is that Dickinson was a gentleman planter and a lawyer. The uncomfortable truth is that he also owned human beings. Like many in his class, he inherited slaves and purchased others. At one point he held as many as thirty seven across his properties. The crops on his lands did not demand daily slave labor the way tobacco did in the Chesapeake. His wealth came mostly from grain and corn. That eased his path to emancipation, but it does not erase what came before. Dickinson did not defend slavery as a positive good. He wrestled with it. He bought some people to keep families together and to prevent sales that would ship them out of the region. That is less condemnation than auction, but it is not praise either. It is a man trying to make a moral account inside an immoral system.

When the wave of Quaker discipline against slaveholding arrived in the Philadelphia region in the 1770s, Dickinson heard it. In 1777 he conditionally manumitted his slaves, a legal act that required bonds and formalities that were not small. By 1786 or 1787 he unconditionally freed those still bound to him. He maintained ties with some of the people he freed. They stayed on his property as paid workers or tenants. He was one of the few prominent founders to make emancipation concrete well before the nineteenth century. This is part of the paradox that makes American memory uneasy. A wealthy man born to a planter’s life helped launch a revolution in liberty while owning other human beings, then changed, and freed them. He does not absolve his generation. He shows that conscience could move in that generation long before the cotton gin hardened the country’s arteries.

Dickinson’s public life began in Pennsylvania politics with a test that would define his style. In 1764, when Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Galloway pushed to convert Pennsylvania from a proprietary colony to a royal one, Dickinson opposed them. It was not because he loved the Penn family. It was because he feared what a royal overhaul would strip away. He warned that the colony might lose its control over taxation and the peculiar liberties it had won over decades. He correctly read the empire’s mood. Strengthen the crown’s grip and the little spaces where liberty had lived in practice would close. This was not romance. It was prudence. His friends might change, his tone might harden, but his method never really shifted. He looked for constitutional ground that could hold under stress.

The Stamp Act crisis of 1765 brought him to the front rank. In the Pennsylvania Assembly he drafted strong resolutions against the Act. He traveled to the Stamp Act Congress and took the lead in writing the Declaration of Rights and the Petition to the King. He did not call for riots. He urged colonists to proceed with their business without noticing the Act at all. That was civil disobedience before the phrase had a capital C and a capital D. If stamps were required on legal papers and newspapers, he argued, then the people could simply ignore the requirement and continue. The ministry had created a dead letter. The colonists could leave it unmailed. There is a deeper lesson here. He understood that power often collapses not when it is struck, but when ordinary men refuse to lend it their routine obedience. He preferred peaceful, collective refusal to violent talk that gave ministers the excuse they craved.

His greatest popular triumph came two years later. In 1767 and 1768, as Parliament rolled out the Townshend duties, Dickinson published the twelve Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. The title was a ruse. He was no subsistence farmer. He was a gentleman who knew how to hide steel under courtesy. The letters walked readers through the constitutional stakes. Parliament, he wrote, could regulate trade across the empire as a matter of general policy. It could not levy duties for the sole purpose of raising revenue in America without consent. That crossed the line between regulation and taxation. That turned free subjects into “abject slaves.” The phrase was not an accident. He made liberty visceral by forcing readers to imagine the alternative. If a distant legislature could take your property without your consent, then the name for your condition was bondage. The letters spread across the colonies and jumped the ocean. They made Dickinson famous in coffeehouses and council chambers. They also birthed a song. He wrote The Liberty Song, which carried the refrain the country would repeat for two centuries. By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall. It was not a sentimental tune. It was a political code. He meant it.

From 1774 through 1776 Dickinson’s pen did not dry. In the First Continental Congress he drafted the Petition to the King and helped shape the Continental Association, a tool that used commerce as a weapon without firing a shot. In the Second Continental Congress he pressed a three part strategy. Prepare for war, prosecute it if necessary, and keep the door open for negotiation. He wrote the Olive Branch Petition. He revised Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms until the paper spoke like a people who preferred peace yet would fight as a matter of duty. And in 1776 he drafted the first version of the Articles of Confederation. That draft was bolder than the final product. He proposed a stronger central structure, protections for religious liberty that showed his concern for dissenters, and even asked the question the country would dodge for generations about slavery. Congress was not ready for that draft. It was not ready for Dickinson’s timetable either.

Then came July 1776, the moment that makes schoolchildren and pundits divide men into heroes and cowards. Dickinson opposed an immediate declaration. He did not oppose independence in principle. He argued that a declaration without a confederation, foreign support, and military readiness was a speech without a sword. He believed some colonies were not yet at peace with the step and would fracture under pressure if forced into it quickly. He knew how unity worked and how easily it could be splintered. So on July 1 he spoke against rushing the vote. On July 2 he absented or abstained so that Pennsylvania could reach unanimity and the country could speak with one voice when it finally spoke. There are men who love the sound of their own consistency more than the truth. Dickinson did not insist on being counted so loudly that he drowned out the chorus. John Adams never forgave him. Adams called him a piddling genius and worse. They were not merely feuding. They were talking past one another. Adams believed the public needed the moral thunder of a declaration and that thunder itself would make allies appear and doubts dissolve. Dickinson believed thunder without bolts could invite a storm the young republic could not survive. You can decide who was right. The country needed both.

If you want a test of sincerity, look at what men do when their policy loses. Dickinson’s policy lost. He did not sulk. He took up service. He commanded the Philadelphia Battalion in New York with the rank of Brigadier General. Later he served as a private in the Delaware militia during the Philadelphia campaign. The British burned his Fair Hill estate and seized his Philadelphia home for a hospital. He paid what patriots pay. He never peddled victimhood. After the war’s early storms he returned to Congress, this time for Delaware, and he signed the Articles of Confederation that he had once tried to make stronger. That, too, teaches something. Realists do not wait for perfect documents before they do imperfect good.

The people of two states trusted him enough to make him their chief executive in turn. He served as President of Delaware from 1781 to 1783 and then as President of Pennsylvania from 1782 to 1785. In both places he worked for stability more than glory. Pennsylvania had fallen into the hands of radicals after 1776. Dickinson helped begin a counterrevolution that brought the state back toward institutional balance. He managed the aftermath of the 1783 mutiny in Philadelphia with restraint and without bloodshed. It is easy to celebrate bold charges. It is harder to notice when a leader keeps a city from tearing itself apart.

No founder who worked as long as Dickinson did came away blind to the Articles of Confederation’s weaknesses. He watched the states bicker and the treasury empty while foreign powers sniffed at American borders. He chaired the Annapolis Convention in 1786, which issued the call for a general convention to repair the national frame. In 1787 he sat in the Philadelphia Convention as Delaware’s delegate. He knew what small states feared. He argued for their equal voice in the Senate and helped secure the principle that became part of the Great Compromise. He also argued for what he called dual sovereignty. The national government and the states each held real power in their own spheres. Neither could pretend to be the sole source of authority without turning the other into a tenant. He wanted a strong general government that could act for the whole, but one bound by structure, separated powers, and habits of restraint. He pushed for experience over theory and helped secure the Origination Clause, which sends revenue bills to begin in the House. He wrote the Fabius letters during ratification, under a pen name that signaled what he admired. Fabius Cunctator saved Rome by patience and timing. Dickinson urged Americans to ratify a constitution that would give liberty a frame and then to judge their passions by that frame. Delaware ratified first. He was proud of that, and he had earned the right to be.

The later years of his life widened rather than narrowed his concerns. He drafted the Delaware Constitution of 1792. He corresponded with national leaders and offered counsel that made hawks growl. When the fever to fight France rose in 1797, he cautioned against a war that would cost blood without securing the republic’s interests. He published his collected political works in 1801, a habit that smacks of vanity in some men but reads like a gift in his case. He wanted the next generation to have the sources in one place, to see the arguments laid out, to think before shouting.

His philanthropy never looked like a pose. He gave generously to relieve the unhappy. He funded schools for poor children and supported prison reform. The Pennsylvania Prison Society grew from those impulses. He supported religious toleration as a principle, not a slogan. He advocated for women in ways that were unusual among founders, not as ornaments of private virtue alone but as people with rights and economic dignity. The gender inclusive language that appeared in his draft of the Articles was deliberate. He told his daughters to know their accounts and keep their independence. Such advice now sounds ordinary. In the eighteenth century it was a challenge to custom.

He died in Wilmington on February 14, 1808, worn out by service and poor health. Thomas Jefferson called him one of the great worthies of the revolution. Jefferson had clashed with him on paper, but he kept his eye on the whole of a man’s work. Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which he and his wife helped found, stands like a stone footnote to a life spent educating a people for self government. The historians who first shaped the national story in the nineteenth century did not always treat him kindly. The country wanted thunder. It wanted heroes who galloped at the sound of a drum. It did not want a gentleman who said that drums should not beat until the powder was dry and the neighbors were ready to march. Adams’s stinging words about Dickinson circulated for decades, and many writers took them as gospel. That judgment has not aged well. Modern scholarship has rediscovered what the generation that read the Farmer letters knew. Calm is not cowardice. Patience is not surrender. The kind of conservatism Dickinson practiced is not a brake on liberty. It is the steering wheel.

What exactly did he conserve. He conserved the habit of grounding political action in law, precedent, and the lived experience of communities. He conserved the truth that unity is not a feeling but a discipline. He conserved the refusal to break men and institutions simply to enjoy the thrill of breaking them. In moments of crisis, men like this are scolded by both extremes. The impatient accuse them of timidity. The fearful accuse them of treachery. And yet when the smoke clears, it is often their architecture that still stands.

There is one last paradox worth considering. Dickinson believed that a people should proceed without notice of unjust laws. He meant it. He also believed that a people should not pretend they were a nation until they had done the work of becoming one. That distinction could save us still. We are great at announcing things. We declare every appetite a right and every preference a moral crusade. We turn politics into theater and treat constitutional limits as stage props. Dickinson would say that the price of liberty is not endless assertion. It is self control, prudence, and the steady power of consent. He would tell us to use the tools our ancestors built. Petitions, elections, federalism, local institutions, the right to say no, the duty to say yes when law and conscience align. He would remind us that small states matter. Minorities of belief matter. The quiet people who prefer to work and raise families matter even when they do not trend online.

What about his blemishes. He owned slaves and then freed them. He was slow to declare and quick to serve. He kept a moderate tone when the world rewarded fury. You can call those contradictions. You can also call them growth. The founding era was full of brilliant talkers. It needed men who could slowly align life with principle. Dickinson tried to do that. He failed at times. He also succeeded where it counted most. He persuaded Americans that their cause had constitutional ground. He helped the colonies resist without losing their soul. He helped the states bind themselves into a workable union. He used his power to lift others and not to burn enemies. If you think all that sounds small, take a look around.

The story opens at a plantation and ends at a college. In between are the petitions, the letters, the songs, the battles, the laws, and the charities. It adds up to an argument that never expires. Liberty requires memory. The people who know where their rights came from know how to defend them. The people who forget drift into abstractions and then into the arms of whatever strong man promises to make the abstractions real. John Dickinson knew that an American revolution was not a riot with a flag. It was a civilizational decision to govern ourselves under laws we consented to, while preserving space for conscience and community. He could hold two ideas in his mind at once. Resist wrongful power. Curb your own.

There is a scene I like to imagine. It is July 1776. The room is hot. The words are sharp. A future president sneers that the Penman is small. The Penman listens. He does not match insult for insult. He bows to the vote and girds for service. He goes home to find his estate burned. He goes back to work. Decades later a former rival calls him a great worthy. Colleges teach students who do not know his name. The republic he helped frame endures long enough to forget him and then, mercifully, to remember. That is as American as it gets.

In a country that now confuses speed with strength, Dickinson offers an older strength. He tells us to put the house in order before we invite the neighbors. He tells us to unite because division is a luxury for empires at rest, not for small republics trying to live in a dangerous world. He tells us to hold rulers to law and to hold ourselves to the same standard. He tells us that to be taxed without consent is a form of slavery and that to live without self government is a kind of sleep. He tells us that conscience should be protected, that prisons should reform, that poor children should learn, that women should know their accounts, and that former enemies should be treated with enough dignity to make tomorrow possible.

John Dickinson’s legacy is not a monument you tour once and forget. It is a set of working parts. Pick them up and they still fit. Use them and you can still repair things. If you want a phrase that captures his politics, take the one he wrote into a song that colonists sang as they organized boycotts, penned petitions, and formed committees. By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall. He did not mean a vague unity of feelings. He meant the kind that writes rules, pays bonds to free people, guards the rights of small states, keeps the peace during mutinies, and says no to unjust demands without throwing a single brick. That kind of unity is not theatrical. It is the stubborn patience of free men and women who intend to stay free.

So remember the Penman in full. Remember the farmer who was not a farmer. Remember the conservative who led a revolution. Remember the slaveholder who emancipated people and the gentleman who drilled as a private. Remember the president of two states who preferred stability to applause. Remember the delegate who fought for the little commonwealths and for the larger one they made together. Remember the writer who borrowed a Roman hero’s name to tell Americans that patience is a weapon. Remember that our politics still needs men and women who can carry contradictions without breaking, who can resist without hating, and who can yield when unity demands it without abandoning the truth. That is the long lesson of John Dickinson. It is quiet. It is stubborn. It is good.