John Dickinson

Biography

John Dickinson was born in Maryland in 1732, the son of a successful planter and enslaver and his second wife. When John was eight years old, the family moved to Delaware. There, Dickinson was educated by private tutors until at eighteen he went to Philadelphia to study law with John Moland. In 1753, he headed to London to complete his legal education at the Inns of Court. He returned to America four years later and quickly established himself as a prominent Philadelphia lawyer. In 1770, he married the daughter of a wealthy local merchant, a union that further secured his place among Pennsylvania’s social elite.

Dickinson had already taken his first steps into politics in 1760, when he served in an assembly of three Delaware counties as its speaker. Two years later, he combined his Pennsylvania and Delaware political careers by becoming a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly. There, he proved to be a conservative voice in the colony’s ongoing political disputes by defending the Quaker charter against an effort by Benjamin Franklin’s faction to void it.

But in the matter of the struggle between the colonies and Britain, Dickinson proved to be more radical. In 1765, he led the Stamp Act Congress that opposed Parliament’s first direct tax on the colonies. He then penned an influential pamphlet entitled “The Late Regulations Respecting the British Colonies … Considered,” in which he urged Americans to work for repeal of the Act. Two years later, he wrote a series of newspaper articles attacking the Townshend Acts. These “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” condemned the new taxes and restrictions but held out hope for a peaceful conclusion to the growing conflict.

The “Letters” were applauded across the colonies; Dickinson was given an honorary law degree from the College of New Jersey, a Boston meeting publicly thanked him, and he became well known in England as well as in the colonies. But Dickinson would not call for a break from the Mother Country or for violent resistance to its policies. Instead, he favored boycotts of British goods and peaceful civil disobedience. He disapproved of New England’s more aggressive tactics, and when Massachusetts asked for aid following the Boston Tea Party, Dickinson opposed providing it. Throughout 1775, he drew up petitions asking the King to repeal Parliament’s offending actions. Even after shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, Dickinson declared his belief in a peaceful solution to the escalating conflict.

At the Second Continental Congress in 1775-76, Dickinson drafted what came to be known as the Olive Branch Petition, asking the King once more to participate in a reconciliation. When the petition was rejected, the Congress moved forward to debate independence. While other political leaders supported a declaration of independence, John Dickinson remained steadfast in his opposition to the separation of the colonies from British rule.

Dickinson abstained from the vote on the Declaration of Independence and, after it passed, he would not sign his name to it. He understood the impact his refusal would have on his reputation. “My conduct this day,” he declared on July 4, 1776, “I expect will give the finishing blow to my … diminished popularity.” Since the other delegates seemed ready to pass a proposal that no man could remain in the Continental Congress without signing the Declaration, Dickinson voluntarily departed. John Adams, who had been Dickinson’s major adversary on the floor of the Congress, voiced his admiration for Dickinson’s “alacrity and spirit,” but was glad of his departure.

Over the next few years, the struggle between conservatives and radicals played out once more, this time in Pennsylvania politics. The radicals controlled the writing of the state’s constitution, but in the last years of the war, men who shared Dickinson’s conservatism gained power. By 1782, they had elected John Dickinson as President of Pennsylvania. In 1785, exhausted from new struggles with the radicals, he resigned his position and returned to Delaware.

In 1787, he served as a delegate from Delaware to the Constitutional Convention. However, due to illness, Dickson missed many sessions and ultimately departed the Convention early. But while he was there, he played a central role in seeing the Connecticut Compromise, later known as the Great Compromise, adopted by his fellow delegates. He was not present for the signing of the Constitution, but authorized George Read to sign for him.

John Dickinson served briefly as a Delaware state senator in 1793, but his declining health forced his retirement from politics a year later. He spent his final years working to advance the abolition movement and publishing two volumes of his collected political writings.

By the time he died in 1808, the once tarnished reputation of the man known as the “Penman of the Revolution” was restored. President Jefferson himself declared that “a more estimable man, or truer patriot, could not have left us.” And he praised Dickinson as “[a]mong the first of the advocates for the rights of his country when assailed by Great Britain,” and as a political leader who “continued to the last the orthodox advocate of the true principles of our new government.” Dickinson’s name, Jefferson concluded, “will be consecrated in history as one of the great worthies of the revolution.”