Independence (27 page)

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.
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Continuing to speak out, Dickinson in 1766 authored a pamphlet that aimed at arousing opposition to parliamentary taxation in Great Britain’s Caribbean colonies.
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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,
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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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Dickinson’s newfound celebrity was only one change in his life. In the summer of 1770, at age thirty-eight, he married into the powerful Norris family. Mary, his thirty-year-old bride, was the daughter of the speaker of the house of the Pennsylvania assembly, as Grace Growdon had been seventeen years earlier, when she married Joseph Galloway. Like Grace Growdon Galloway’s father, Mary Norris Dickinson’s father was one of the wealthiest men in the colony. Rumor had it that Mary brought a dowry of eighty thousand pounds to the union. Dickinson also acquired Fairhill, the Norris property just outside Philadelphia. The sprawling estate—appraised by the tax office at a value of twenty thousand pounds—exceeded five hundred acres and included a luxurious two-story house and two separate dependencies, one of which Dickinson planned to use as a library. Even so, Dickinson wanted to put his stamp on the mansion. He immediately plunged into a major remodeling job, enlarging and recasting it in a classical Georgian manner. He additionally expanded the already grand gardens and paved a five-hundred-yard driveway. In 1773, Josiah Quincy, a Bostonian who toured several middle and southern colonies, visited Fairhill and called it the most magnificent residence that he saw south of New England. With money to burn, Dickinson additionally acquired a lot on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, just across from the Pennsylvania State House, and in 1771, at a cost of eight thousand pounds, began construction of a magnificent two-story town house. But in 1775, when the Second Continental Congress met, the dwelling was still not completed, and in fact, Dickinson would never live in the house. (During the war, it was used first as a hospital and then, after 1778, leased to the French minister to the United States.) Dickinson also started a family in these years. When he was forty, Mary gave birth to a daughter. A second daughter, the couple’s last child, was born shortly before the outbreak of the war.
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Distracted by the many changes in his personal life, and attached to the minority party in the Pennsylvania legislature, Dickinson kept a low profile in the early 1770s. He was reelected annually to the assembly, usually by a near-unanimous vote. He reemerged on the bigger stage only when the
Polly
, the tea ship bound for Philadelphia, neared the American coast in the fall of 1773. Writing his first major essay in five years, Dickinson penned a piece for the
Pennsylvania Journal
that denounced the Tea Act. Calling the legislation insolent, oppressive, and “Madness,” he urged that “no Man … receive the Tea … nor suffer the Vessel, that brings it, to moor at his Wharf, and that if any Person assists in unloading, landing or storing it, he shall ever after be deemed an Enemy to his Country.”
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The following year, when word of the Intolerable Acts reached the colonies, Dickinson attacked the repressive measures in several published letters. He took the line that London had long wished to carry out repressive actions against Massachusetts and was merely using the Boston Tea Party as a pretext. Perhaps because events were moving so rapidly that summer, these essays failed to attract the notoriety of
Letters from a Farmer
. In fact, by the time he wrote the final letter in the series, Pennsylvania was afire with the battle over sending a delegation to the Continental Congress. Dickinson’s target in his final epistle was Galloway, who was preventing the assembly from supporting a congress. The foes of British coercion, Dickinson said, were “now strenuously endeavouring, IN A PEACEFUL MANNER … to preserve our freedom.” But if Galloway thwarted the planned congress and British tyranny prevailed, he would be “justly chargeable with all the dreadful consequences to the Colonies.” Dickinson asserted that if only a congress of all the colonies could meet and institute a national boycott, North’s government would have to back down, as Great Britain is “So dependent … on us for supplies.”
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