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He was one of the most influential political writers of the American Revolution, helped shape the argument against British taxation, drafted major documents for the Continental Congress, and helped create both of America’s first two systems of government.
Yet when the colonies decided to declare their independence, he refused to support it. For that decision, he paid a steep price that can still be felt today.
Learn more about John Dickinson, the reluctant revolutionary on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
John Dickinson is one of the most misunderstood figures in American History.
Our collective historical imagination portrays him as a loyalist, a coward, or both. In the 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams, he is cast as the antagonist to John Adams and the object of Ben Franklin’s tireless efforts to persuade him of the merits of independence.
The myth of John Dickinson often contradicts the historical reality of John Dickinson.
One of the most common myths about Dickinson is that he was a Loyalist, or someone who preferred continued British colonial control. Loyalism in the colonies before the Revolution was probably more common than we think; some estimates place the number of loyalists at about one-fifth to one-third of the colonial population.
Loyalists usually had a distinct reason for their beliefs; in many cases they were recent emigres from England or worked in the colonial administration and were loyal to the crown. In other instances, their profession, such as merchant or farmer, benefited from loyalty to the crown.
Religious beliefs also prompted loyalist leanings. Members of the Church of England often remained loyal because the British monarch was the supreme head of their church. Religious groups, such as Quakers, who embraced pacifism as a foundational principle, refused to participate in revolution or violence.
Dickinson is often cast as a devout Quaker, which supposedly motivated his beliefs, but that conclusion supported by the evidence. While Dickinson came from a Quaker household and upbringing, he was not active in their religious community as an adult.
His military service during and after the American Revolution contradicted Quaker values. In fact, less than a third of the signers of the Declaration of independence served in the Continental Army and Dickinson was in the small minority who physically took up arms.
Dickinson’s loyalist tendencies came from the constitutional or legal nature of the act of revolution, as well as his deep admiration for the British political system and its safeguards. Dickinson and fellow Continental Congress obstructionist Edward Rutledge of South Carolina both fell into this category.
Like Dickinson, Rutledge was deeply disenchanted with Britain’s actions. Still, both believed that a sudden move to independence would lead to internal anarchy under a reactionary government driven by the feelings and whims of the mob.
Dickinson’s coalition was also aware of the mercantilist benefits of continued ties with Britain and feared losing them by relying on France. He wrote, We have many Points of the utmost Moment to settle with France- Canada, Acadia and Cape Breton. What will content her? Barbary Pirates, Spain, Portugal? Will she demand an Exclusive Trade as a Compensation, or grant Us Protection against piratical States only for a Share of our Commerce?
This reasoning exemplified Dickinson’s intellectual approach: he acknowledged the widespread resentment toward Britain, yet hesitated to leap recklessly into the unknown. He cautioned that an ill-prepared, financially unstable America might find itself vulnerable to France, potentially exchanging one colonial master for another, and facing a far more unpredictable relationship in the process.
Casting Dickinson as a loyalist is inaccurate, considering his legacy of protesting against British policies before the 2nd Continental Congress.
One factor that made his obstinance at Independence Hall so difficult for historians to reconcile was that, a decade before the Declaration of Independence, Dickinson gave the American colonies their foundational legal argument against British overreach.
In 1767, the British Government realized that the best way to raise revenue from the colonies without a vigorous campaign of non-compliance was to disguise its efforts through an external tax, or a tariff.
The British saw firsthand how angrily the colonists viewed direct taxes on things like stamps, so putting taxes on imported goods looked more like the regulation of foreign trade, regrettable for sure, but unlikely to arouse the anger that the Stamp Act had.
Dickinson saw right through the charade and responded with one of the most famous condemnations of British colonial policies. The humbly titled Letter From a Farmer in Pennsylvania was an anonymous series of 12 essays that eviscerated British policies.
His anonymity quickly dissolved, and his fame spread throughout the colonies as the essays were published in papers from Massachusetts to Georgia. Dickinson’s writing appealed to both the farmer reading an essay in a weekly paper and to intellectuals.
Trained in England as a lawyer at the historic Middle Temple in London, Dickinson’s argument was clear and concise. Great Britain had the constitutional authority to regulate imperial trade, but it had no legal right to levy taxes on the colonies to raise revenue without their consent.
In Dickinson’s mind, consent could only come from colonial representation in the British House of Commons.
On the subject of taxation, Dickinson was clear when he wrote: If they have a right to levy a tax on us of one penny, they have a right to levy a tax of a million. For who can define that right? There is no line to be drawn between total liberty and total slavery.
Dickinson did not invent a new idea or legal construct. His argument came from earlier English traditions.
What he did do was unite the colonists under a coherent legal and motivational idea that had the legal clarity to arouse intellectuals and the plain language to rile up the public.
By framing the colonial argument around the constitutional invalidity of British measures, Dickinson’s letters galvanized the colonies to unite behind non-importation agreements and organized boycotts.
After the publication of the letter, Dickinson earned the nickname “Penman of the Revolution”. Dickinson was counted on to write everything, from a song about the Revolution, called the Liberty Song, to legal documents commissioned by the Continental Congresses.
However, his most famous writings were yet to come.
Dickinson asked the President of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, if he could write two documents of the summer of 1775, the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms and the Olive Branch Petition.
Because fighting had started in the Spring of 1775 at Lexington and Concord, the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms was necessary to explain why colonial troops were in active armed conflict with the British.
The Olive Branch Petition was Dickinson’s last-ditch effort at diplomacy.
This document was unique in that it attempted to bypass Parliament, whom the delegates viewed as corrupt and overreaching, and appeal directly to King George III as the father of his people. But when the King refused even to receive the document or its envoy, it effectively silenced the moderate voice in Congress.
The king’s only response came in August of 1775, when he declared the Colonies in open rebellion and deemed the actions of the 2nd Continental Congress treasonous.
Dickinson’s insistence on reconciliation suddenly looked like political obstructionism, and the momentum shifted decisively toward the radicals who wanted independence.
Despite these diplomatic failures, Dickinson continued to argue against declaring independence, enraging congressional radicals and alienating fellow moderates who had once held him in the highest regard.
Dickinson’s argument shifted to one of preparedness. He no longer argued that the Colonists could change British policies through boycotts or negotiation; instead, he argued that the colonies were ill-prepared to take such a dramatic leap as independence.
As the debate raged on for months, and nearly all opposition to independence had vanished, he remained steadfastly opposed.
On the evening of July 1, 1776, in the debate leading up to the resolution for independence by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, Dickinson gave perhaps his most impassioned plea to slow the process down. He said, To escape from the protection we have in British rule by declaring independence would be like destroying a house before we have got another, in winter, with a small family… It is to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.
His arguments weren’t wrong, but at this point they seemed pedantic and repetitive. As the war esclated and the British responded with more violence, his arguments no longer carried the same weight.
Realizing the situation was inevitable, Dickinson nobly stepped aside and was absent from the vote on Independence, allowing Pennsylvania to approve the measure and ensuring ratification, which required a unanimous vote. New York abstained because they hadn’t gotten approval from the state legislature, but later voted for the measure on July 9th.
Dickinson foreshadowed what lay ahead for him in public life after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when he said, My conduct this day, I expect, will give the finishing stroke to my once too great, and too diminished popularity… But I had rather surrender that popularity than surrender the dictates of my conscience.
Dickinson was one of only three delegates to the 2nd Continental Congress who didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence on principle.
Practically overnight, the man who was once considered the voice of the revolution was ostracized. As the Declaration traveled from town to town, read aloud to cheering crowds, the public dragged Dickinson’s name through the mud.
The damage to his reputation began when Pennsylvania revoked his seat in its congressional delegation. He was stripped of his leadership in the Pennsylvania militia, which was part of the Continental Army. Newspapers and pamphlets branded him a Tory sympathizer, and some even went so far as to call him a traitor.
While his colonial neighbors held him in low regard, his standing in Britain was equally bad, as he was still labeled a member of the rebellion. The British, though probably not out of any sort of calculated retaliation, destroyed his two properties outside Philadelphia and his farm in Delaware.
Coupled with the money he actively gave to fund the rebellion and the Continental Army, he was financially ruined.
Perhaps the most damaging consequence for Dickinson was one he never lived to see. Dickinson was effectively erased from the historical record.
Had he not obstructed the work of Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin, and had he not delayed independence for as long as he did, he would have been front and center in John Trumbull’s famous paintings depicting the Founding Fathers.
He had met every criterion of a Founding Father. He had profound writings. He had military service. He had personally funded the Continental Army. Like Washington, Jefferson, the Adamses, and Ben Franklin, his life followed an almost mythological story arc.
But he also had a strong conscience. For that, John Dickinson paid an extraordinary price.
Yet John Dickinson was determined to rebuild his legacy and prove his detractors wrong, to prove he wasn’t a traitor. Despite being stripped of his military rank, he continued to serve in the military, this time as a private in the Delaware militia, where he moved in December 1776.
Recognizing his legal brilliance and service under fire, Delaware sent him back to the Continental Congress in 1779, where he signed the Articles of Confederation, the very national framework he had drafted three years earlier.
His public service continued when the assembly elected him President of Delaware, where he promptly restored financial and political order. He later did the same thing for Pennsylvania.
His story came full circle when he was chosen as a delegate to the Annapolis Convention which was to address the limitations in the Articles of Confederation.
He was then awarded the highest honor: selection to the Constitutional Convention, where his guidance and skill were instrumental in passing the Great Compromise which led to the ratification of the constitution.
While he didn’t join Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison in writing the Federalist Papers, he did take up the cause for Constitutional Ratification through a series of widely read “letters,” called the Fabius Letters.
Dickinson’s conscience also extended to the most glaring hypocrisy of America’s founding. Having inherited enslaved people upon his father’s death, Dickinson became increasingly troubled by the practice. He became one of the few slaveholding Founders to grant his slaves freedom, becoming a vocal advocate for abolition in Delaware.
John Dickinson never achieved the fame of Washington, Jefferson, or Franklin, in part because his most remembered decision was his refusal to support independence in 1776.
Yet few Founders contributed to so many stages of the creation of the United States. He helped formulate the constitutional case against British taxation, drafted the Articles of Confederation, served the Revolutionary cause, governed two states, and helped frame and defend the Constitution.
Dickinson’s career was defined less by opposition to change than by a belief that liberty depended on careful, balanced government. The man who hesitated at independence ultimately helped design the political system that allowed it to endure.