Independence (24 page)

Dickinson was appalled by the thought of royalization. He was close to the Penns, so close that while he was in England, Thomas Penn, the proprietor of Pennsylvania, had taken him to St. James's Palace for George II's birthday reception. Even more, after witnessing what he thought was the dissolution throughout English society and politics, Dickinson had no wish to see the reach of the mother country extended any deeper into the affairs of the colonies. He particularly feared that the Pennsylvania assembly, which he saw as the “guardian of the public liberties” enjoyed by Pennsylvanians, would be fatally weakened should the proprietary governor be replaced by a Crown-appointed chief executive.
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During 1764, Dickinson joined what came to be known as the Proprietary Party, or New Ticket, a faction that was strongest in the western counties, whose inhabitants felt exploited by the dominant eastern counties in matters of taxation and services.

Eloquent, sophisticated, and probably the best-educated public official in the province, Dickinson almost immediately assumed the lead in the fight against Franklin and Galloway. In hot and intemperate assembly debates, Dickinson's conservative stance presaged the position he would often take later in Congress. To Dickinson, change—almost any change—was inadvisable. He seldom wished to run the risk that accompanied making even the slightest transformation. As to royalization, Dickinson cautioned that the gamble was too great. The change might lead to the loss of those bountiful guarantees of religious freedom that Pennsylvanians had enjoyed since William Penn established the colony seventy-five years before. Freedom had been lost in ancient Rome and, more recently, in Denmark by a “neglect of … prudence,” which had resulted in the surrender of “liberties to their king,” he warned. Wariness must be the watchword of Pennsylvanians. “Power is like the
ocean
, not easily admitting limits to be fixed in it,” he asserted. In the torrid daily debates that ensued, Dickinson came close to charging that the Assembly Party's campaign for royalization was a thinly disguised endeavor to fulfill Galloway's and Franklin's insatiable ambition to hold loftier offices and gain ever more power.
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Galloway responded that the Crown “shews its Limits; they are known and confined.” Only rarely, he added gingerly, has any monarch made “any Attempts … to extend them.” But an air of fatalism permeated Galloway's retort. The Crown and Parliament were sovereign over the colonies and could do as they wished. All Americans, he said, were at the mercy of what “Our Superiors think … convenient.”
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As Franklin's and Galloway's Assembly Party was in the majority, the legislature adopted the petition to the king in May. Thereafter, both Galloway and Dickinson published the speeches they had delivered in the legislative battle. Both carefully excised the ill-tempered remarks they had made in the floor debate.
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As was so often the case, however, Franklin stirred the pot. In a preface to Galloway's tract, Franklin sarcastically attacked “Mr. Dickenson”—likely deliberately misspelling his name—whom he portrayed as a parvenu who passed himself off as “a
Sage
in the Law, and an
Oracle
in Matters relating to our Constitution.”
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Dickinson responded with a second pamphlet. Though he shrank from rebuking the more popular Franklin, he went after Galloway, and in a petty and vituperative manner. He assailed Galloway's want of “humanity and
decency
,” his “cruel” rhetoric, lack of understanding of history, faulty reasoning, “falsehoods,” and penchant for “calumnies and
conspiracies
.” Dickinson even alluded to Galloway's allegedly “continual breaches of the rules of grammar; his utter ignorance of the English language; the
pompous obscurity
and
sputtering prolixity
reigning through every part of his piece; and his innumerable and feeble tautologies.”
29
Dickinson had declared war on Galloway.

Galloway gave as good as he got, at one point portraying Dickinson as driven by a “restless thirst after promotion.”
30
The acrimonious charges and countercharges brought things to the breaking point. The two squared off in a fistfight in the yard outside the Pennsylvania State House. Galloway appears to have gotten the best of it. Toward the end of the battle, he was flaying Dickinson with his cane when bystanders intervened to halt the brawl. Dickinson immediately challenged his foe to a duel, though cooler heads prevailed and further violence was averted.
31
Each man thereafter refrained from further publications that defamed the other. But a combustible environment had been created, and party members on both sides joined the fray during the fall election campaign. Some who were bolder than Dickinson lashed out at Franklin, calling him a libertine devoid of moral principles, even breaking the news to the world that young William Franklin was his father's illegitimate child. Astoundingly, when the balloting was completed in October 1764, Dickinson was reelected and both Galloway and Franklin were defeated, although their Assembly Party retained control of the legislature.
32
The losers complained of election fraud, though Franklin candidly acknowledged that he and his partner had been injured among German-American voters by anti-German comments he had made. Primarily, however, Franklin and Galloway had gone down to defeat because many voters shared Dickinson's apprehension about converting Pennsylvania into a royal colony.
33

It was in this white-hot atmosphere of partisanship that word of the Stamp Act reached Philadelphia. Dickinson and the Proprietary Party waged a battle against it, as much from opposition to parliamentary taxation as from the hope of destroying Galloway and Franklin and wrecking their cherished scheme of royalization. Though lacking a majority in the assembly, the Proprietary Party succeeded in having the legislature send a delegation to the Stamp Act Congress in New York that autumn. Chosen to be part of the delegation, Dickinson played a key role in that conclave and had a hand in writing the Declaration of Rights. When he returned to Philadelphia, Dickinson published a broadside proclaiming that the “critical time is now come” for Pennsylvanians to decide whether they “shall be Freemen or Slaves.” He followed that with
The Late Regulations Respecting the British Colonies
, his first pamphlet aimed at reaching a national audience. It was published in London as well and reached such a large readership that it went through two printings.
34

Continuing to speak out, Dickinson in 1766 authored a pamphlet that aimed at arousing opposition to parliamentary taxation in Great Britain's Caribbean colonies.
35
But it was what he penned the following year that made Dickinson not only the most renowned American political figure but also the most widely respected public official in all the colonies.

Dickinson had been stirred in 1766 by Parliament's suspension of the New York assembly for its defiance of the Quartering Act. The Townshend Duties came hard on the heels of that step. Beginning in November 1767, Dickinson answered both actions of Parliament with a series of a dozen essays—he called them “letters”—which first appeared in the
Pennsylvania Chronicle
. In the habit of the time, Dickinson wrote anonymously, signing his pieces “A Farmer.” (Galloway immediately suspected that Dickinson was the “Farmer,” though he believed his rival had collaborated with others of the “damned republican breed” to produce what he huffed was “damned ridiculous! mere fluff!, fustian! altogether stupid and inconsistent.”)
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From the outset, Dickinson's essays created a sensation. Other Philadelphia newspapers rapidly reprinted his letters, and eventually nineteen of the twenty-three American newspapers printed his dozen essays. In March 1768, after the final letter in the series appeared, all twelve compositions were compiled and published as a pamphlet titled
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies
.
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Letters from a Farmer
was an overnight sensation. Some sixty pamphlets on the imperial crisis had previously been published in America,
38
but none had equaled its sales. In fact, sales of Dickinson's tract likely exceeded the combined sales of all previous pamphlets on Anglo-American troubles. Multiple printing runs were required to meet the public demand. A few years earlier, Dickinson—who, like most public figures, was terribly ambitious—had told a friend that someday he would “enjoy making a bustle in this world.” With
Letters from a Farmer
, he had achieved his goal in spades. By 1770 engravings of his image were published in almanacs and some editions of the pamphlet, his figure had been added to a waxworks museum in Boston, and a newly launched ship had been named for him, with his likeness adorning the figurehead on the vessel's bow. In 1769 he was awarded an honorary degree by what is today Princeton University (and so too was Galloway that same year). “To the Farmer” became the most popular toast from Maine to Savannah. Numerous town meetings endorsed his publication. Several members of Parliament who were regarded as friendly to America lauded the pamphlet, as did Voltaire in France, where a French-language edition was soon published. Lord Dartmouth clipped items pertaining to Dickinson from London newspapers, though he made no public comments. Franklin in 1768 paid for the publication of
Letters from a Farmer
in England and, cognizant of the shifting attitudes in America and the growing popularity of critics of ministerial policy, contributed a brief preface. Whereas he had earlier directed acerbic jabs at Dickinson, calling him an upstart, Franklin now praised his “able learned Pen” and called him “a Gentleman of Repute” who was widely extolled in the colonies for his “Knowledge of … Affairs.” So popular was Dickinson that when his younger brother, Philemon, stood in for him at a Sons of Liberty rally in Boston in 1769, a record crowd of several hundred turned out.
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No one factor explains the brilliant success of
Letters from a Farmer
. Dickinson wrote in a coherent and elegant manner, though he was not given to catchy, head-turning phrases, and no single sentence in the lengthy tract was widely quoted by contemporaries. The disenchantment with England and disillusionment with its leaders, which Dickinson had come to feel during his residence in London, spilled over in his writing and resonated with a colonial populace whose eyes were just opening to the threat posed by Parliament. Yet, Dickinson's tone was not that of a fire-breathing radical, which was crucial, as most Americans were not ready for militancy. Dickinson not only specifically denounced independence but he also, with considerable optimism, promised his readers that redress would come if only the colonists united in a peaceful protest. Dickinson benefited too, in that he was among the first colonists to take up his pen against the Townshend Duties, leading sympathetic newspapers to embrace his work.

Dickinson was also his own publicist, and he possessed a sure instinct for self-promotion. Knowing that Galloway and his followers would do all they could to limit his appeal in Pennsylvania, he reached out to activists in Boston, sending them copies of his newspaper essays with the hint that their publication would help “Kindle the Sacred Flame” of liberty throughout New England. Boston's popular leaders found Yankee publishers for
Letters from a Farmer
and helped make famous “A Song for American Freedom” that Dickinson wrote early in 1768 and sent along to them as well.
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Using the melody of a popular English song of the day, Dickinson's “Liberty Song,” as it was often called, urged for boldness and sacrifice. It began

Come join hand in hand brave Americans all,

And rouse your bold hearts at fair Liberty's call.

No tyrannous acts shall suppress your just claim,

Or, stain with dishonour America's name.

In Freedom we're born and in Freedom we'll live,

Our purses are ready,

Steady, Friends, Steady.

Not as Slaves, but as Freemen our money we'll give.
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In
Letters from a Farmer
, Dickinson started with the presumption that Parliament's attempts to tax the colonists were “unconstitutional” and “destructive to the liberty of these colonies.” He continued: “No free people ever existed, or can ever exist, without keeping … ‘the purse strings' in their own hands.” He reiterated what many colonial assemblies had said during the Stamp Act crisis. A tax was a tax, whether it was an internal or an external tax. From this, it followed that Americans must “answer with a total denial of the power of parliament to lay upon these colonies any ‘tax' whatever.” However, Parliament must have the authority to regulate imperial commerce, and it was the “
duty
and
prudence
” of Americans “to maintain and defend” the power of Parliament to do so. In an oblique slam at Galloway and Franklin and other leaders who appeared unwilling to stand up to the British threat, he warned that a “
people
is travelling fast to destruction, when
individuals
consider
their
interests as distinct from
those of the public
.” He emphasized that he was not writing as an advocate of independence. The “happiness of these provinces indubitably consists in their connection with Great Britain,” he contended. Although he had cautioned about a “decay of virtue” in the mother country, he believed that peaceful protest from throughout the colonies would secure the repeal of the objectionable taxes. “Our
vigilance
and our
union
are [our]
success
and safety,” he said, for Americans understood that they “
cannot be
HAPPY,
without being
FREE,” and “we cannot be free,
without being secure in our property
.” He fervently believed, he said near the end, that “several of his Majesty's present ministers are good men, and friends to our country,” and when they understood the “
truths
” that Americans held dear, they would hasten to abandon parliamentary taxation.
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