Thursday, November 26, 2015

Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania III, Part IV: Convictions, Blind and Otherwise

Though John Dickinson endeavoured throughout Letter III to make clear his distaste for violent rebellion and his belief that resistance by force would have run counter to many of the ideals he and his fellow colonist were keen to assert, he was willing to admit that armed insurrection was a viable final resort. This he was prepared to acknowledge seemingly, and tellingly, because rebellion against an established authority was itself a precedent within the British historical context. This apparent clash of influences – non-violence on the one hand and regard for British/English precedent on the other – is highly characteristic of the tone of Letter III, and of Dickinson’s public career more broadly. Always there seemed to be a tension between his moral impulse to avoid conflict and his intellectual desire to preserve the rights he believed were the birthright of all mankind. To this clash Dickinson’s regard for British culture and history piled on further demands, molding his perspective and the ideas he was willing to consider in ways that were at times uncomfortable, and not infrequently exposed him to frustration and professional disagreement. Letter III is a microcosm of these tensions; within its paragraphs are ideas and principles that sometimes mesh and sometimes clash, that show their author staunchly opposed to violence in one instance and agreeing that armed resistance is in keeping with English historical precedent in another.       

Speaking to that specific example, Dickinson wrote in the twelfth paragraph of Letter III, “If at length it becomes undoubted that an inveterate resolution is formed to annihilate the liberties of the governed, the English history affords frequent examples of resistance by force.” A cursory examination of the history in question would seem to amply bear out Dickinson’s claim. The First (1215-1217) and Second (1264-1267) Barons’ Wars occurred between rebellious alliances of nobles and Kings John and Henry III, respectively, while the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was a consequence of the social tensions unleashed by the Hundred Years War and the Black Death.  The popular revolt known as the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536-37) resulted from Henry VIII’s desire to reform the English church, while the English Civil War (1642-1651) and the Glorious Revolution (1688-89) both constituted mixed popular/elite reactions to the political absolutism of the House of Stuart and their accordant denigration of the role of Parliament.

While these conflicts occurred at different times, under different circumstances, and in response to many different aggravating factors, they all nevertheless speak to the strength of tradition as a motivating factor in English/British political and cultural life. The barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta because they felt their customary privileges were being curtailed, Northern English Catholics rose against Henry VIII because he threatened the sanctity of their church establishment, and the Roundheads raised their banners against Charles I as a direct result of his flagrant disregard for the conventions of Parliament. The history of popular revolt in Britain, it could fairly be said in 1767, was not a testament to the appeal of revolution, but to the power of reaction. This is perhaps why Dickinson felt comfortable (or at least comfortable enough) acknowledging “the English history” and its “frequent examples of resistance by force.” Troubled though he was by the concept of political violence, there was very little in the history of his and his contemporaries’ mother country to suggest that the end result of armed rebellion was inevitably the complete and irrevocable overthrow of the established order. Occasionally the Crown or its ministers went awry and had to be set right by force of arms. Sometimes the events that followed were bloody, and on at least one occasion played out over the better part of a decade, but balance always returned in the end. And if that had been the case in Britain, why wouldn't it come to pass in British America as well?

But of course Dickinson hoped it would not come to this. He was willing to acknowledge that there was precedent in British history for armed resistance to the abrogation of established rights, but no part of him seemed ready to admit that such an outcome was inevitable in the American context. As aforementioned, this was likely due in no small part to the way his Quaker sensibilities and Enlightenment-derived intellectual values meshed to produce an absolute conviction that violence of any kind was abhorrent and political violence particularly counter-productive. This may have proved to be, over the course of the 1760s and 1770s, a rather difficult position to continue to uphold in the face of Britain’s increasingly harsh reactions to American resistance. Nevertheless, it was one that most of Dickinson’s contemporaries could at least respect if not agree with. The Founders, again, were not men who necessarily sought out conflict or relished violence. Dickinson’s steadfast refusal to sanction independence in the summer of 1776, a consequence of his belief that separation from Britain would expose the colonies to a brutal reprisal, did prove to be problematic. Yet few, if any, of his fellow delegates were willing to fault the gentleman from Pennsylvania simply because he wished to avoid bloodshed. Dickinson’s steadfast conviction in favor of non-violence was doubtless harder to swallow, however, when it combined with his avowed regard for Britain, British culture, and the British monarchy as in Letter III.    

 Returning to the eighteenth paragraph of Letter III, it bears repeating that Dickinson averred,

We have an excellent prince, in whose good disposition towards us we can confide. We have a generous, sensible and humane nation, to whom we may apply. They may be deceived. They may, by artful men, be provoked to anger against us. I cannot believe they will be cruel and unjust; or that their anger will be implacable.

This may appear, considering the behavior British ministers and military strategists would later display, a rather naïve declaration on Dickinson’s part. Perhaps it was, to a degree. Yet within this passage there would seem to be mingled the moral and intellectual stands, previously discussed, that defined his outlook, his principles, and his public career. He claimed that George III was an excellent prince. While there were others among the Founding Generation who would have disagreed, the then-present monarch, who was neither a spendthrift nor a rake, still compared favorably to the later members of the departed House of Stuart. Dickinson claimed that Britain was a generous, sensible and humane nation. Doubtless it was in certain aspects. Having travelled to London as a young man and seen beyond the imperial façade most familiar to his fellow colonists in distant America he would certainly have been more inclined than many of his contemporaries to describe the mother county in such glowing terms. 

            Dickinson also claimed that the British people may have been misled by “artful men,” and thus provoked to anger against the American colonies. This was a conclusion derived from a distinctly Enlightenment-tinged view of the universe. Whereas in prior ages a great deal of significance had been attached in European intellectual circles to the role that fate and divine intervention played in the affairs of humanity, the 17th and 18th centuries witnessed a shift towards scepticism and rationalism. God, many Enlightenment thinkers argued, did not move human events forward; all human effects had human causes, whether they was obvious or not. This in turn nurtured a paranoid strain in Enlightenment thought, revolving around attempts to discern and uncover the human intelligence that directed great events. The reaction of many early American revolutionaries to British trade and taxation policies deployed in the 1760s – their refusal to believe that Britain wasn't attempting to restrain the colonies’ economic growth out of a sense of jealousy or fear – fit very neatly in this mold. John Dickinson was not immune from following a similar thought process, though his conclusion was markedly unlike those of the majority of his contemporaries. Rather than perceive the citizens of British America as the victims of an underhanded conspiracy, the scion of Poplar Hall appeared convinced that the British public, and perhaps even the king, were the ones being deceived for some ill and unknown purpose. Considering how prominently the values embedded in the Enlightenment seem to have shaped Dickinson’s worldview this sort of deduction is understandable, particularly when one also considers his general willingness to look upon the British nation with familiarity and sympathy.

            Finally, Dickinson declared a belief that British authorities, if approached via the customary and “constitutional” means he outlined in Letter III, would not react in a manner that was “cruel or unjust.” Nor could he conceive that their anger, such as it was, would be “implacable.” Herein Dickinson’s moderation, and his unflagging optimism, is perhaps hardest to explain. Clearly he was wrong. He had no way of knowing that, of course, and so ought not to be judged for it. Yet he drastically miscalculated the tenor of response even moderate resistance to certain British tax and trade policies would receive. The British government, as it would very shortly turn out, was entirely capable of being cruel, and of treating those who considered themselves citizens of the empire in a manifestly unjust fashion. This, in truth, should not have come as much of a surprise.

            Look, for instance, at the Jacobite Uprisings. Now, it’s important to remember that the Scottish Jacobites, who as Catholics opposed the overthrow of James II that was the main result of the Glorious Revolution, became guilty of treason against the Crown when they took up arms against the House of Brunswick and the authority of George II. Consequently, a somewhat forceful response on the part of the British government was not unexpected. However, the manner in which the culture of the Scottish Highlands, where Jacobitism found many of its strongest adherents, was accordingly suppressed by British government policy in an attempt to break down the power structure of the Jacobite clans could fairly be characterized as cruel and unusual. The final battle of the last Jacobite Uprising took place in 1746 on a windswept moor at a place in Scotland called Culloden. The government forces, led by the Duke of Cumberland, emerged victorious, and thereafter ordered that the wounded that still lay on the field of battle be sought out and killed over the course of the two days that followed. Thereafter some 20,000 head of privately-owned livestock taken from surrounding farms were driven off to nearby Fort Augustus and sold, the profits being split among the government forces. Later that same year Parliament passed the Act of Proscription, making it a punishable offence for residents of certain regions of Scotland to possess or use weapons without prior authorization, the Dress Act, which forbade the wearing of kilts or tartans within Scotland, and the Heritable Jurisdictions Act, which transferred the power of Scottish clan chiefs to preside over the civil and criminal trials of their dependants to officials appointed by the British Crown.  
        
            While it must again be emphasized that these punishments were meted out in response to an armed uprising against the authority of the Crown, an act far in excess of what Dickinson proposed he and his follow colonists might pursue in the most extreme scenario, their effects still appear needlessly draconian. Worse yet, they seem to constitute a systemic violation of the traditional rights held by a portion of the British population. The Bill of Rights of 1689, a document that defined the relationship between Parliament and the Crown for centuries thereafter, stated that Protestant subjects were to be permitted to bear arms “suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.” Admittedly the clause “as allowed by law” may have permitted a certain amount of leeway as to how and why Parliament determined certain populations within Britain were to be disarmed. However, the fact that a guarantee of this kind was considered important enough to include in the Bill of Rights at all would seem to indicate that such restrictions would only be put in place in particularly uncommon cases. Furthermore, though the core of Jacobite support in Scotland came from the Catholic clans and their Chieftains, who by their faith were not protected by the relevant passage of the Bill of Rights, the Act of Proscription made no distinction as to the faith of those it was intended to effect. Therefore, Protestants who perhaps had no intention of raising their hand against the authority of Parliament may well have suffered a violation of what was otherwise considered a vital civil right simply because of what region of the country they lived in.

            Furthermore, though the traditional legal jurisdiction possessed by Scottish clan Chieftains that the Heritable Jurisdictions Act revoked were not guaranteed by the terms of the Bill of Rights, they would seem to fit within the same realm of customary or inherited sovereignty as trial by jury, which was. Perhaps English Parliamentarians did not see it that way in 1746. Perhaps in their minds there existed a very important distinction between the right of every English person, embedded in common law traditions, to be tried before an assembly of their peers, and the Scottish clan right to have individual offences judged by the Chieftain to which a person owed fealty. Doubtless trial by jury, to these individuals, seemed open, transparent, and communitarian, while clan jurisdiction seemed narrow-minded, parochial, and, well, clannish. Thus, while in the English common law sense that precedent was equal to value the Scottish clan jurisdiction was as valid as trial by jury, the former was preserved by statute while the latter was easily done away with. As with the disarming of certain segments of the Scottish population inherent in the Act of Proscription, the complete disregard for Scottish legal tradition at the core of the Heritable Jurisdictions Act would seem to constitute a punishment that was both cruel and unjust.

            As to what any of this has to do with John Dickinson, well, that rather depends on what one imagines his sense of political and historical awareness was like. Less than ten years after the Battle of Culloden and the passage of the aforementioned punitive measures Dickinson came to London for a three year period to study the law. He was, if there is any truth to the accounts, an intelligent, well-read young man. Though occasionally dazzled by what the imperial capital had to show him, his letters home attest to a critical eye that was perfectly capable of seeing through the pomp and circumstance and evaluating British political culture with a degree of detachment and pragmatism. It would thus seem strange, upon reflection, for Dickinson to have had no knowledge whatsoever of the most recent Jacobite Uprising, its implications, and consequences. He was, by his own admission in Letter III, someone who greatly admired the reigning royal House of Brunswick, and “the ‘45” as the rebellion became colloquially known, was one of the most significant challenges to that family’s authority during the whole of its time on the throne. Having also paraphrased a Parliamentary speech dating from 1660 in Letter III, that of Lord Clarendon, it would also appear that Dickinson was familiar with Parliamentary proceedings dating back at least a century, easily encompassing the events of the 1745 revolt and its legal after-effects. Yet, if the above-quoted passage from Letter III is any indication, he did not believe it likely that Britain would react harshly to American resistance.

            There are several possible explanations for Dickinson’s rather optimistic characterization of the British government’s potential reaction to American disobedience. Accepting that he was likely aware of the draconian measures Parliament had enforced within his own lifetime against certain segments of the British population, it’s possible he believed there was a significant difference between what his discontented fellow colonists were leaning towards and what the disgruntled Jacobites actually did. This, in fairness, is a perfectly valid perspective. The Scottish Highlanders who took up arms against the British government in 1745 did so in order to overthrow George II and replace him with James Francis Edward Stuart, son of the deposed James II. The measures that Dickinson proposed in response to continued British violation of traditional colonial prerogatives came up far short of such an obvious act of treason, and so any resultant retaliation might reasonably have been expected to be similarly modest. It’s also possible that Dickinson did not consider the punitive measures meted out against the Scottish Jacobites to constitute acts of cruelty or implacable anger because they were not directed against people of English extraction. Scotland did not share England’s common law traditions, and so the fundamental protections embedded in the 1689 Bill of Rights might perhaps have been construed not to have applied to the Scottish people in the same way they did to the English. Because of how parochial a view this would encompass it appears a poor fit for John Dickinson, student of the Enlightenment and compassionate supporter of peace and humanity that he was.

            It’s also possible that John Dickinson’s stated belief in Letter III that Britain would not react in a cruel or unjust manner to American petitions for relief from unprecedented taxation was a consequence of his own anxiety to forestall a violent confrontation. Imagine, for a moment, that Dickinson had offered the opposite assessment at the conclusion of Letter III. Imagine he made it clear that the British government was sure to react to any challenge to its authority with anger, violence, and a complete lack of concern for the well-being of its American subjects. Any reasonably intelligent American colonist who read this might thereafter reasonably conclude that if Britain’s anger was to be aroused regardless of the manner in which the colonies registered their discontent, said colonies might as well take up arms in an attempt to gain a better result in the long run. That Dickinson argued in favor of a peaceful, “constitutional” response to British intransigence at the same time that he avowed the magnanimity of a potential British response was perhaps an attempt on his part to anticipate just such a conclusion. If, as he claimed, the British government were likely to look upon non-violent colonial resistance with a degree of forbearance it would perhaps have behooved his fellow colonists to resist any sudden urge to begin an armed struggle and instead place their faith in the peaceful measures Dickinson described.

            Had this, in fact, been Dickinson’s intention, it would seem to reveal something of the desperation that appears to permeate much of Letter III. This desperation, as mentioned previously, is rooted in the some of the impulses and influences that Dickinson responded to and channelled when he sat down to write Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. On the one hand he truly believed that the rights of his fellow colonists, to govern themselves and to be taxed only in exchange for legislative representation, had been violated by a string of British government policies, the most recent being the Townsend Acts of 1767. Said violations, he stated in no uncertain terms, could not go unanswered lest they, “acquire strength by continuance, and thus become irresistible [.]” This would seem to have placed Dickinson in the same camp as the other Founders, most of whom rose to prominence in their respective colonies in the 1760s and 1770s by speaking out against the Stamp Act and Townsend Acts and exhorting their fellow colonists to take action to oppose them. Where Dickinson differed, however, was in the way he accompanied calls for political action with a strong admonition against the use of violence and a general show of support for the British monarchy. This curious mix was, again, owing to Dickinson’s Quaker upbringing, and his time spent in London in the 1750s. Though Dickinson of course had no way of knowing how difficult the British government would make it for its North American subjects to assert their rights whilst standing firm upon a platform of non-violence, certain aspects of his written work from the immediate pre-Revolutionary era nonetheless betray a hint of apprehension as to that very subject.

            The final paragraph of Letter III appears to give evidence of this sense of uncertainty and trepidation. After spending the better part of eighteen paragraphs recommending to his fellow colonists that they seek to remedy the abrogation of their rights by organizing their efforts, by pursuing petitions, and by above-all maintaining a sense of calm and focus, Dickinson admitted that resorting to “constitutional” methods might not be enough to achieve the ends they desired. “If,” he wrote in the nineteenth paragraph of Letter III,

It shall happen, by an unfortunate course of affairs, that our applications to his Majesty and the parliament for redress, prove ineffectual, let us then take another step, by withholding from Great Britain all the advantages she has been used to receive from us. Then let us try, if our ingenuity, industry, and frugality, will not give weight to our remonstrances. Let us all be united with one spirit, in one cause. Let us invent–let us work–let us save–let us, continually, keep up our claim, and incessantly repeat out complaints.

Dickinson’s passion is herein clear enough, but not so is what he actually intended his fellow colonists to do. He asked them to withhold from Britain, “all the advantages she has been used to receive from us,” without explaining what that might entail, or giving any sense of the level of coordination such an effort would require. He asked them to marshal their “ingenuity, industry, and frugality,” again without going into any explicit detail as to what these estimable qualities were supposed to refer to. And then, if the combined force of a boycott on British goods (maybe?) and the application of old-fashioned colonial know-how were not sufficient to secure a desirable result, he requested that the colonies invent (what?), work (on what?), and save (what?), all the while repeating the petitions which by this point had presumably proven ineffectual. As 18th-century English rhetoric went Dickinson could have done far worse, but as to meaningful reassurance that the cause of colonial rights had many options yet available to it, this final paragraph of Letter III is troubling in its lack of substance.

Likely this was because Dickinson simply didn't know what else to say. Dedicated though he was to both the cause of colonial rights and non-violence, he may have suspected on some level that the two would prove incompatible in the American context. Rather than admit this, rather than nod in the direction of political violence and thereby give sanction to the deaths of untold numbers, he instead restated his prior position, mouthed platitudes about ingenuity and invention, and called for unity of purpose among the various colonies.           

Friday, November 20, 2015

Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania III, Part III: Motherland

            Following his attachment to the moral sensibilities of 18th-century Quakerism and the philosophical values most commonly associated with the European Enlightenment, the aspect of John Dickinson’s personality that seems most strongly imprinted on the text of Letter III (and in turn on his entire public career) is his abiding affection for Great Britain, its culture, and its role as mother country to the Thirteen Colonies. In this veneration of the colonial motherland he was far from alone among his fellow revolutionaries. No less illustrious a figure than John Adams, second President of the United States, was a noted Anglophile whose association of stability, tradition, and good government with the British example became a source of ridicule in his later career. Alexander Hamilton too, the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, found much to admire in the British system of government, and in many ways modelled his plan for the 1st Bank of the United States on that of the Bank of England. Indeed, some degree of fondness for British law, history, culture, or art was hardly uncommon in the American colonies in the years leading up to their fateful break with king and country. The great majority of the colonial population on the eve of revolution were of British descent, the rights and liberties many of them venerated were of British origins, and the literature, theatre, and music they consumed were almost all products of British writers, playwrights and composers. Britain was the font of their civilization, law, and culture, and though many among them found fault with how British authorities had taken to administering the colonies, comparatively few had no use for Britain at all.

            That being said, that fact that John Dickinson actually travelled to Britain as a young man did set him apart from the great majority of his fellow colonists. To them the motherland was a source of history, culture, and legal precedent, and perhaps also a distant familial origin point. To Dickinson, however, it was something much more tangible. In his aforementioned letters home during his youthful sojourn in the 1750s he regularly described with wonder the sheer variety of people who walked the streets of London, the quality of the buildings, palaces, and cathedrals, the beauty of the carefully manicured gardens, and the consummate skill on display during theatrical performances. For him, Britain was much more than an idea to be venerated or a culture to be emulated; it was a living, breathing, bustling place full of people of intelligence, ability and wit who were day by day working to expand the borders of the greatest empire the world had ever known. While his stay in Britain inspired its share of diffidence as well, particularly where it touched upon the topic of social advancement, Dickinson could not have but come away from his time in distant Albion with a very vivid sense of what Britain had to offer the colonies and what they stood to learn.

            Evidence of Dickinson’s particular affinity for Britain can be found peppered throughout the text of the third of his venerable Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. To his credit, the sum of said references do not paint the author of Letter III as naïve, thoughtlessly loyal, or particularly unrealistic in his assessment of the crisis then unfolding between the colonies and the British government. Some display a certain amount of respectful deference, another a slightly more practical, if familiar, tone, while others still verify Dickinson’s affinity for and knowledge of British law and history. At no point does Dickinson exhibit the excessive credulity or filial loyalty frequently associated by later revolutionary critics with those who openly professed pro-British sentiments. The scion of Poplar Hall seemed not to ground his affection for the mother country in catechistic tradition. Rather his loyalty appeared to stem from a fairly pragmatic, engaged consideration of British virtues, the lessons contained in British history, and the usefulness of continuing a harmonious association between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies.  

In the fifteenth paragraph of Letter III, for instance, Dickinson stated very plainly that,

The prosperity of these provinces is founded in their dependence on Great Britain; and when she returns to her “old good humour, and her old good nature,” as Lord Clarendon expresses it, I hope they will always think it their duty and interest, as it most certainly will be, to promote her welfare by all the means in their power.

Rather than couch an argument against any sudden break between Britain and the colonies in terms of intangibles like loyalty, duty, or honor, Dickinson resorted in Letter III to economics and a close knowledge of British intentions. The Thirteen Colonies, he argued, owed whatever financial success they enjoyed in 1767 to their relationship with Great Britain; severing that bond, however it might address certain philosophical disputes in the short run, would adversely affect the lives and livelihoods of countless colonists in the long run. At the same time that this assertion ran decidedly counter to that later put forth in Thomas Jefferson’s 1774 publication A Summary View of the Rights of British America, in which the Sage of Monticello claimed that the colonies principally owed their existence, stability, and economic viability to the hard work and sacrifice of the citizens, Dickinson’s argument was also at least partially true. 

As mentioned in weeks past, Britain’s colonial empire was administered on broadly mercantilist principles. This meant, in general, that raw materials from the colonies were directed toward the mother country, manufactured goods were exported and sold in the colonies, and strict regulations were put in place that prevented said colonies from trading with other European powers or their imperial possessions. Consequently the economies of the Thirteen Colonies at the end of the 18th century were mainly agrarian, placed little emphasis on manufacturing, and relied exclusively on British markets for various necessities, luxury goods, and customers for their produce, iron, fish, timber, and furs. This relationship mainly benefited British manufacturers, though the colonies were able to make up some of the trade imbalance by establishing a major presence in the shipping and shipbuilding industries (the latter accounting for 5-20% of employment overall). The profits that these sectors generated, combined with the surplus of land, lack of large, crowded urban areas, and high agricultural output, ensured that the average standard of living (for people of European descent) in the colonies in the late-18th century was actually higher than in Britain itself.  Were Britain to suddenly cease to be the Thirteen Colonies’ sole trading partner, however, particularly as a result of a punitive blockade or embargo, the colonial economy would have greatly suffered for its lack of diversity, scarcity of credit, and industrial immaturity. In this sense the colonies were generally quite prosperous, and that prosperity was indeed based mainly in their dependence on Britain. Dickinson’s accompanying plea for the colonies to, “promote [Britain’s] welfare by all the means in their power” could thus be interpreted as an exhortation for his fellow colonists to place their own economic well-being before any sense of emotional or moral outrage recent events may have prompted.

Obviously the colonial American economy turned out to be far less dependent on Great Britain than Dickinson indicated in Letter III. Thanks to a combination of material and monetary support from European allies like France and the Netherlands, as well as the sale of bonds and the creation of financial institutions like the Bank of North America, the United States was able to weather the sudden lack of reliable export markets and sources of manufactured goods that colonial independence brought about in 1776. Dickinson, of course, had no way of knowing this, and so his admonition in favor of maintaining the established relationship between Britain and the colonies ought to be taken at face value as one motivated by legitimate concern. Capable as I am sure my own audience is of giving Dickinson a fair hearing, it was likely made more difficult for certain of his own readers to do the same because of his paraphrasing Lord Clarendon’s words in support of said argument.

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, was a royalist politician who served as a close advisor to Charles I and Charles II during the English Civil War (1642-1651), the exile of the House of Stuart, and their subsequent Restoration in 1660. In addition to serving as Lord Chancellor and Chancellor of the Exchequer, two of the Great Offices of State, Clarendon was later father-in-law to future king James II (1685-1688) and grandfather to Queens Mary II (1688-1694) and Anne (1702-1714). The passage that Dickinson chose to rephrase as “the old good humour, and the old good nature” was delivered by Clarendon during a speech before Parliament in September, 1660 in which he attempted to encourage his fellow countrymen to accept the legitimacy of the newly-restored Charles II in exchange for a general amnesty upon those who had fought for or otherwise supported the Parliamentarians. The King, Clarendon assured his audience, wished only, “That you will join him in restoring the whole Nation to its primitive Temper and Integrity, to its old good Manners, its old good Humour, and its old good Nature.”

Dickinson’s willingness to put forward the words of someone like Lord Clarendon as a model for the proper relationship between the colonies and the British government was doubtless made somewhat problematic by the fact that the House of Stuart and its supporters were generally not looked upon with favor by the citizens of British America. Indeed, he intimated as much himself in the fourteenth paragraph of Letter III. “Great Britain,” he wrote, “under the illustrious house of Brunswick, a house which seems to flourish for the happiness of mankind, has found a felicity unknown in the reigns of the Stuarts.” Though this was something of an exaggeration – the monarchs of the House of Brunswick, which as of 1767 included George I, George II and George III, were not particularly well-loved in the colonies at the time of Dickinson’s writing – the combined reign of the Brunswick monarchs tended to compare quite favorably among the citizens of British America to that of the prior House of Stuart.

Charles II (1660-1685), for instance, oversaw the resurgence of the Anglican Establishment in England, demonstrated strong Catholic sympathies, sided with the Tories during the Exclusion Crisis (thereby asserting his Catholic brother’s right to succeed him), and dissolved Parliament in 1681 so that he could rule on his own. In British America, wherein freedom of religion was widely held as a paramount right, Catholics were generally disliked or distrusted, and the Whigs (rather than the Tories) were heralded as the true guardians of English liberty, such actions and proclivities did not endear the restored House of Stuart to the general population. James II (1685-1689) did little to improve upon his dynasty’s reputation. An avowed Catholic, he oversaw the amalgamation of the New England colonies with New York and New Jersey to form the Boston-governed Dominion of New England in 1686, enlarged and strengthened England’s standing army in response to rebellions against his authority, and (like his brother and predecessor) dismissed Parliament in 1685 in order to circumvent their repeated objections. These were, once again, not actions that met with a kind reception among the citizens of British America. In keeping with their aforementioned reverence for the values enshrined in the Bill of Rights of 1689, and as evidenced by their frequent objections to the various iterations of the Quartering Act, they were particularly sensitive to the threat posed by a strong standing army and highly protective of what they perceived as their traditional right to political representation. Consequently, the reign of James II did great harm to the reputation of the Stuart dynasty in America, if not to the monarchy in general. The deposition of James in 1688-89 during the Glorious Revolution thus met with few objections in the Thirteen Colonies, and the accession of the sober, Protestant George I to the throne in 1714 was even viewed as cause for celebration.

Considering how poorly the Stuart dynasty was regraded in the American colonies after their deposition in 1688, and how closely many of his contemporaries identified with the Whigs who had opposed the often-arbitrary leadership of Charles II and James II, Dickinson’s choice of reference in Letter III does indeed seem rather odd. Lord Clarendon was, as aforementioned, a close personal advisor to Charles I and Charles II. He supported the latter’s re-establishment of Anglican supremacy and showed a very public distaste for the House of Commons during his times as Lord Chancellor after 1660, advising the younger Charles on more than one occasion to dissolve said body when it proved particularly uncooperative. If Dickinson truly hoped in 1767 to convince a colonial audience full of Whig-sympathizers, religious dissenters, and pseudo-republicans that although the colonies had been wronged by British ministers the greatest wisdom laid in continued loyalty combined with peaceful resistance, Lord Clarendon would seem among the least useful sources of rhetorical support.
 
As to why Dickinson then chose to draw inspiration from the royalist Lord Chancellor, it may simply have been the case that the author of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania was among that educated portion of the pre-revolutionary American population who in fact did not identify very strongly with the Whigs, the Country Party, Lord Bolingbroke, or any of the purveyors of social contract theory like Thomas Hobbes or John Locke. This is not to say, however, that he was dyed-in-the-wool Tory. As previously discussed, Dickinson was a student of the Enlightenment and a person with strong moral convictions shaped by a Quaker-influenced upbringing, neither of which would have been particularly amenable to the conservative Anglicanism of the Tory elite. Rather it may have been the case that Dickinson cultivated a royalist sympathy that was distinctly moderate and non-partisan. Though he might have agreed that Lord Clarendon was perhaps not an exemplar of particularly worthwhile values as of 1767, it’s entirely possible Dickinson also believed that the words Clarendon used to describe the ideal relationship between the English Crown and its subjects a century earlier were not thereby worthless. This would seem to have been a risk on Dickinson’s part, considering once again the general composition of his audience. Then again it may have been the case that at such an early period in the prelude to the American Revolution it was not yet clear where the fault lines of the coming ideological conflict were to be drawn. In 1767 it may have been possible for a person to quote Lord Clarendon or similar English statesmen and not be pilloried as a Loyalist, in a way that simply wasn't conceivable a decade later.

To be entirely fair to Dickinson he was not immovably opposed to any and all forms of resistance to British intransigence; only it was the means by which resistance accomplished that troubled him. In the seventeenth paragraph he tellingly asserted that, “The Constitutional modes of obtaining relief are those which I wish to see pursued on the present occasion; that is, by petitions of our assemblies, or where they are not permitted to meet, of the people, to the powers than can afford us relief.” This statement is of particular interest for several reasons. The first concerns Dickinson’s use of the term “Constitutional.” Because of the frequency with which the word, or related terminology, is thrown around in the contemporary new media, a modern reader of Letter III could be forgiven for misunderstanding its intended meaning in the above-quoted passage. Rather than refer to the United States Constitution, which of course didn't exist in 1767, Dickinson intended to put his readers in mind of the unwritten British Constitution, or more generally to the legal and cultural principles that support its existence and operation. Whereas American constitutionalism is based on codification, wherein the paramount law of the land takes the form of a single written text, British constitutionalism encompasses the interpretation of multiple documents, statutes, edicts, common law rulings, and political conventions, potentially from across the entirety of British history. Because the British Constitution is not a single document but rather a centuries-spanning accretion of legal concepts, tradition and precedent play a large role in determining what is and is not constitutional in any given situation. When Dickinson thus claimed to support, “The Constitutional modes of obtaining relief” in Letter III, he was effectively asserting the primacy of established methods over untested innovations. That this was in keeping with the British political and cultural traditions in which Dickinson and his contemporaries had been raised and educated, at the same time that it happened to discourage a quick resort to violence, was perhaps why he felt comfortable attempting to combine a respect for precedent with a general call for his fellow colonists to remain vigilant of their rights.    

            The second reason the above-quoted passage is worth considering is because it gives evidence of Dickinson’s apparent endorsement of some form of extra-legal assembly of “the people” as a means to circumvent the manipulation or dismissal of the colonial assemblies. Though the formation of such an assembly would have constituted an act of rebellion against the political establishment, it was on its face still a peaceful course of action. And while it may have constituted disobedience aimed at the authority of the Crown in the colonies, the fact that it recognized the innate sovereignty of the people themselves as possessing greater legitimacy (in keeping with Enlightenment ideals of natural law) perhaps made it seem acceptable to Dickinson. Furthermore, it likely appealed to him on a personal note because of his prior participation in an “assembly of the people” in the form of the 1765 Stamp Act Congress. This august body he mentioned in the fifth paragraph of Letter III as a symbol of the success that could be achieved via non-violent resistance. “If the behavior of the colonies was prudent and glorious then,” he wrote, “and successful too; it will be equally prudent and glorious to act in the same manner now, if our rights are equally invaded, and may be as successful.” Thus, the loyalty to and affection for Britain Dickinson put forward in Letter III were offered a subtle complication. While in one section he asserted the need to maintain the Anglo-American relationship in economic terms, and paraphrased the proto-Tory Lord Clarendon in support of the same, he seemed willing in another to endorse the colonists taking matters into their own hands when met with continued British obstinacy. Granted, the method by which Dickinson advised said colonists to assert their sovereignty was quite civil and restrained by the standards of the bloody conflict that was to follow. The principle of disobedience, however, remains inherent in the assertion; Dickinson may have nurtured a personal regard for Britain, its politics, and its culture, but his sense of political loyalty was evidently conditional. Provided violations of said loyalty were justified by the treatment received, and that actions taken in response were fundamentally peaceful, there was evidently a limit beyond which the scion of Poplar Hall could conceive of rebellion against his beloved mother country.

Friday, November 13, 2015

Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania III, Part II: Sensibilities and Values

            One of the most striking aspects of Letter III, indeed one of the chief reasons I chose to feature it here, is the way it very much lays bare the social, political, and moral values of its author. One of the reasons that I began this very series was the desire on my part to develop a deeper understanding of who the Founder Fathers were as human beings. I wanted to know, and to share with others, where these men came from, what they believed, and how they expressed themselves, and I wanted to contemplate what all of those things could tell me about what kind of people created the strange and beautiful land we know as the U.S. of A. Some of the documents they left behind reveal a great deal. Some are deeply infused with the personal sensibilities of Jefferson, Madison, Washington, and Hamilton, and so act as unparalleled windows into their minds, their emotions, and even their flaws. Others are somewhat more opaque. Marbury v. Madison, undeniably important though it is within the history of American jurisprudence, by necessity allows little room for Chief Justice Marshall’s character to shine forth amidst its dry, sensible legalese. Marbury v. Madison was worth discussing for other reasons, but revealing of the personality and sensibilities of perhaps America’s greatest Chief Justice it is not.
   
            The third entry in John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania is another beast altogether, and a somewhat contradictory one at that. While stylistically very much in keeping with the scholarly mode of debate perfected by such English writers as Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard in their reformist Cato’s Letters (written between 1720 and 1723), it is perhaps among the most personally resonant documents I've yet encountered from a member of the Founding Generation. Within its scant lines and paragraphs Dickinson reveals himself most plainly, whether it was his intention to do so or not. At once formal and sincere, stiff and passionate, Letter III­ reveals in its form and subject the distinct tension at the heart of John Dickinson’s career as an advocate for the cause of American liberty. A lover of Britain and a lover of his native soil, he seemed ever trapped by dual loyalties, pushed and pulled by the seemingly incompatible desire to both uphold the inherited traditions he had come to revere and fight for the rights he knew to be sacred. Letter III encapsulates Dickinson’s attempt to mesh these sensibilities and values, successfully or otherwise, and so presages the rather difficult position he found himself in once the conflict between colonies and Crown spilled over into bloodshed and both sides began to lose their taste for talk.

            But now I'm getting ahead of myself. Not every element of Letter III represents a conflict of interests and sensibilities. Some of the influences that are most prevalent seem to mingle quite harmoniously, and so give insight into how different strands of moral, intellectual, and political philosophy contemporary to the late-18th century shaped the perspective of men like John Dickinson. Two prevailing elements of Dickinson’s character that shine through the text of Letter III are what we shall call his Quaker sensibilities on the one hand, and his attachment to Enlightenment values on the other. The former was doubtless a product of Dickinson’s upbringing and the influence of his family. The Quakers, or Religious Society of Friends, are a famously non-violent sect, and their devotion to avoiding bloodshed at all costs is deeply engrained in the arguments Dickinson offered in Letter III. The latter, meanwhile, was almost certainly owing to his education. The Enlightenment was a multinational, multi-confessional intellectual movement, rooted in the 17th and 18th centuries, that emphasized reason, equality, and liberality as a remedy for the intolerance, superstition, and jealousy that defined centuries of bloodshed in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Dickinson’s calls in Letter III for prudence and equanimity to triumph over impulsiveness and anger are very much in keeping with these philosophical values and the reformist sentiments that inspired them. Though these two distinct intellectual and moral influences are rooted in different traditions, Dickinson attempted to combine them in the text of Letter III in such a way that they might appear as facets of the same core ideal. 

            Now that I look back on it, that probably didn't make a whole lot of sense. Perhaps I should just show you what I mean.

            In the eight paragraph of Letter III Dickinson stated, as a warning against any rash response to the Townshend Acts, that,

The cause of liberty is a cause of too much dignity to be sullied by turbulence and tumult. It ought to be maintained in a manner suitable to her nature. Those who engage in it, should breathe a sedate, yet fervent spirit, animating them to actions of prudence, justice, modesty, bravery, humanity and magnanimity.

This was, in many ways, the thesis of Dickinson’s public life, and in it can be found principles endemic to both the Enlightenment and Quaker traditions. Talk of liberty, for instance, would seem to belong to both. Quakerism is a self-consciously anti-hierarchical system of belief that lays emphasis on the relationship between God and the individual directly rather than through the mediating influence of a church or ministry. Thus inherent to practising the Quaker faith would seem to be the cultivation of individual freedom from arbitrary outside control or direction. The Enlightenment was also greatly concerned with liberty, its foundation in the human spirit, its limits within political society, and the need for its protection. English Enlightenment political philosopher John Locke posited in the late-17th century that the preservation of individual liberty was the reason that complex social organization existed in human culture; man ceded a portion of his liberty to some form of government in return for protection against said liberty’s violation. Thus inherent in the existence of a state or government, in theory, is a core desire to preserve the liberty of the individuals of whom it is composed. Though Quakerism and the Enlightenment didn't necessarily conceive of it in the same way, liberty was still one of the most important values within their respective moral and intellectual frameworks. So it perhaps seemed to Dickinson that the faith in which he had been raised and the philosophy he had imbibed as a young man both preached of the paramount value of liberty to human existence. 

            Liberty was not the only sphere in which Quakerism and the Enlightenment seemed to cross over. Look again to the cited paragraph, and in particular at the values explicitly named. Dickinson believed, if Letter III is any indication, that true guardians of liberty needed to be animated by a sense of, “prudence, justice, modesty, bravery, humanity and magnanimity.” These are certainly lofty ideals to aspire to, and ones which seem quite at home in either Quaker theology or Enlightenment philosophy. Prudence, modesty and humanity seem particularly Quaker, given that sect’s past prizing of plain speech, plain dress, equanimity in behavior, and social justice. Quaker meeting houses are known for their lack or ornamentation and their services for a lack of rigid structure, and members of the American Quaker community were among the most fervent anti-slavery activists of the 19th century. Likewise magnanimity and justice smack of the Enlightenment, which was again a philosophical movement rooted in the reform of human behavior and social organization as a means of preventing bloodshed. Enlightenment scholars and reformers generally regarded disagreements of faith as one of the roots of organized human conflict. Regimes that believed themselves the only purveyor of truth, as in cases of state religious establishments, took a dim view towards potentially threatening religious diversity. Repression and warfare was the common result, the unprecedented brutality of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) being the most stark example. Tolerance, openness, or perhaps even magnanimity, were the values Enlightenment thinkers came to believe human civilization needed to embrace if further and more-destructive conflict was to be avoided.

            Quakers valued magnanimity as well, and justice. Derisively labelled in their early existence as “levellers,” members of Religious Society of Friends attach no inherent value to social advancement or hierarchy. In the Quaker mindset, to make a broad generalization, all people are fundamentally equal, and so the arbitrary raising up or holding down of individuals or populations represents a contravention of God’s will. Thus when Dickinson spoke of justice in Letter III he could well have meant it in the Quaker sense of desiring to balance the scales of human existence in accord with divine purpose. At the same time, the Enlightenment attached value to concepts like prudence as well, and humanity in particular. One of the great projects of the philosophical Enlightenment was the cultivation of a sense of universalism; that is, a sense that all people are of a common substance, possess a common inherent worth, and are capable of achieving the same common goals. Though most often associated with Europe and its direct sphere of influence, the scope of the Enlightenment was theoretically planet-wide. The scholars, reformers, public servants and philosophers of the Enlightenment regarded their efforts as being directed at all humanity, from the most base to the most exalted. Thus, when Dickinson wrote of a need from his American countrymen to react to British insults with prudence and humanity he may well have meant it in the Enlightenment sense.

            The point, which has hopefully became a little clearer, is that at least some of what Dickinson expressed in Letter III, some of the values he hoped his fellow colonists would endeavor to embody, could easily have been the product of either his moral or philosophical outlook. Indeed it’s likely they represented a blending of both. As Dickinson consciously or unconsciously filtered his scholarly, philosophical understanding of the conflict between Britain and the American colonies, which prized prudence over rash action and embraced a strong sense of humanist empathy, through the lens of his moral sensibility, which abhorred violence and valued humility and self-control, what perhaps emerged was a personal ideology that embraced rational thought, peaceful manners, dignity, sympathy, and righteousness. To Dickinson this was doubtless a harmonious mixture, combining reason and compassion in a way that was mutually reinforcing. Anger, after all, was the enemy of both reason and peace; clear-thinking, and thus problem-solving, could best be accomplished in a state of composure, accompanied by a clear assessment of one’s abilities and of the conflict at hand. This much he stated in the sixteenth paragraph of Letter III, writing that, “Anger produces anger; and differences, that might be accommodated by kind and respectful behavior, may, by imprudence, be enlarged to an incurable rage.” If this rage were permitted to be prolonged, Dickinson continued, it would soon enough cloud the minds of all concerned to the point that the original cause of their conflict would be forgotten, replaced only with greater anger at the memory of past offences and mounting thoughts of revenge. This vicious cycle, once entered, was near impossible to escape from unscathed. The best solution was to simply avoid giving over one’s reason to considerations of violence and conflict, thereby averting needless bloodshed and permitting the unfettered mind to arrive at a resolution.  Not only was this right, in the moral terms that Dickinson understood, but it made sense. Unfortunately, and as he was perhaps aware, not everyone shared John Dickinson’s strong moral aversion to conflict. Though the reformers of the Enlightenment were devoted to avoiding the outbreak of further destructive wars in Europe and abroad, their philosophies not infrequently sanctioned violence and political upheaval in service of preserving certain fundamental rights.

            Look again at some of the words Dickinson used in the above-cited paragraph. Think about some of the ideas he was expressing. Liberty, he asserted, was too dignified an idea to be tainted by calls to violent action. This is an idea very amenable to Quaker sensibilities, liberty being the foundation of an individual expression of faith, but doesn't necessarily square with certain aspects of Enlightenment philosophy that this series has previously explored. Remember John Locke’s social contract theory from Two Treatises of Government? Locke’s innovation, embraced by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, was in describing a “right of revolution” whereby a free people could rightfully overthrow a government that had become abusive or tyrannical. Dry as this might sound, some application to force would seem unavoidable in cases where the tyranny of a government stemmed from its own application of state-sanctioned and directed violence. In this mode, which seemed to be that favored by the majority of the Founders following the Battle of Lexington and Concord in April, 1775, how could liberty be too dignified to be “sullied” by tumult? Was not some form of tumult at times required in order to ensure the preservation of liberty? In the aforementioned paragraph Dickinson also claimed that liberty, “ought to be maintained in a manner suitable to her nature.” As I'm sure that his contemporaries asked of him at some point or another, was not the maintenance of liberty worth sacrificing one’s life for? To this the scion of Poplar Hall  might had agreed, though his moral sensibilities likely would have compelled him to add that it was only in the most extreme cases worth killing for.

            This apparent contradiction between Dickinson’s personal interpretation of the meaning and significance of liberty and that embraced by the majority of his contemporaries is captured clearer still in the eleventh paragraph of Letter III. Therein Dickinson stated that though, “Every government at some time or another fall into wrong measures […] every such measure does not dissolve the obligation between the governors and the governed.” While Locke – and Jefferson, and any number of his fellow revolutionaries – may have agreed that not every error committed by a government at the expense of its citizens was reason enough for revolt, the admonition that Dickinson next deployed would likely have seemed overly permissive of continued abuse. “It is the duty of the governed,” Dickinson implored,

To endeavor to rectify the mistake, and to appease the passion. They have not at first any other right, than to represent their grievances, and to pray for redress, unless an emergency is so pressing as not to allow time for receiving an answer to their applications, which rarely happens. If their applications are disregarded, then that kind of opposition becomes justifiable which can be made without breaking the laws or disturbing the public peace.

Whereas Locke emphasized the right of revolution as a fundamental check against thee emergence of tyranny in government, to the point of it almost becoming a kind of social obligation, Dickinson associated the immediate response to perceived abuses with patience, caution, and reverence for authority. Even in cases of continued government intransigence, which he argued would “rarely happen,” he maintained that the people’s reaction should still be fundamentally lawful and peaceful. Though again it should not be doubted that men like Locke would have agreed with Dickinson’s general desire to avoid bloodshed if at all possible, the extent to which Dickinson preached deference and appeasement would likely have struck them with a degree of distaste.

            It isn't that Dickinson’s strongly-expressed desire to avoid conflict was a value that his fellow Founders were unable to appreciate. They were, by and large, not warlike men. They understood, when push came to shove during the events of April, 1775, that taking up arms against Britain was undertaking from which it would be impossible to escape unscathed. They thus did not enter into war lightly, though they believed it in service of a thoroughly just cause, and remained throughout its prosecution sensible of the suffering the effort to secure American liberty were mingled with. There was, however, something in Dickinson’s tireless devotion to peace at all costs that many of them doubtless found troubling. Avoiding unnecessary conflict, and maintaining a sense of dispassion and reason, were values very much at the core of the gentlemanly and scholarly ideals embraced by most of the Founders regardless of their profession or from which of the colonies they hailed. Yet these were also men who had largely been educated in a distinctly English tradition that placed special attention on traditional rights, their irreducible value, and the need to guard against their abrogation. Peace was a great virtue, they understood, but their nevertheless came a time when it became necessary for a person to stand up and fight for what they believed. From this perspective Dickinson’s adamant calls for humility, non-violence, and absolute respect for the “public peace” would perhaps have seemed overly permissive. Continue to appease corruption, to bow to tyrants, and do nothing more but beg redress and how long would it take for the offenders to become accustomed to their subjects’ leniency? Without a short, sharp shock, could British authorities be depended on to come to their senses and reform the policies that had raised such alarm in the American colonies? Dickinson seemed unwilling to even entertain these questions, so utterly convinced was he that reason could only ever be given free expression when paired with peace and dispassion.

            The lengths to which Dickinson believed this, if Letter III is any indication, extended to a point beyond which might seem possible for someone considered to be among America’s Founding Fathers. In the eighteenth paragraph of Letter III he appeared to sum up his position on the conflict that had emerged between the American colonies and the British Crown. Whereas someone like Thomas Paine might have signed off with the 18th-century equivalent of “George III is a wanker,” or Benjamin Franklin would likely have tossed off an irony-drenched appeal to the enduring wisdom of the British political establishment, Dickinson adopted a very different tack indeed. “We have an excellent prince,” he wrote,

In whose good disposition towards is we can confide. We have a generous, sensible and humane nation, to whom we may apply. They may be deceived. They may, by artful men, be provoked to anger against us. I cannot believe they will be cruel and unjust; or that their anger will be implacable. Let us behave like dutiful children who have received unmerited blows from a beloved parent. Let us complain to our parent; but let our complaints speak at the same time the language of affliction and veneration.     

It would seem difficult, knowing what came next, not to consider Dickinson hopelessly naïve. Yet naïveté was most certainly not what motivated him to put forth a statement such as that quoted above. John Dickinson was not a foolish man, nor was he unacquainted with some of the less virtuous aspects of British political culture. But he was someone, as will be discussed in weeks to come, for whom Britain loomed large as a source of pride, inspiration and affection. And he was also a man who attached a great deal of social and moral value to ideals like patience and forbearance. As the first several paragraphs of Letter III make quite clear he would not have denied for a moment that the policies enacted by the British Parliament in 1767 and aimed at the American colonies represented an imminent threat to the liberties of the citizens thereof. To speak against the same he characterized as a kind of moral obligation, writing in the second paragraph that, “While Divine Providence […] permits my head to think, my lips to speak, and my hands to move, I shall so highly and gratefully value the blessing received as to take care that my silence and inactivity shall not give my implied assent to any act, degrading to my brethren and myself [.]”

    In spite of this apparent enthusiasm, which seems fairly characterized as an expression of Enlightenment activist zeal, Dickinson was seemingly constrained in how far he would be willing to go and what he would be willing to sanction by an ingrained moral revulsion to violence. To the modern reader these two impulses, both evident in Letter III, doubtless seem somewhat contradictory. Yet for Dickinson they were not, or perhaps he simply hoped so. Clearly he believed with great conviction that the injuries visited upon his fellow colonists could not go unanswered, but his suggestion as to the proper response seems so restrained. The right of Britain’s American citizens to representation in the political process, to govern themselves in accordance with British parliamentary tradition, and to enjoy the benefits of trial by jury were all being seriously threatened. Dickinson’s answer to these challenges was to “behave like a dutiful child,” “complain to our parent,” and make use of “the language of affliction and veneration.” Veneration, yet? What was there to venerate in the behavior of the British officials who intended to rob the colonists of their traditional relationship to their governors while claiming an unrestricted right of taxation? What sort of parent deserves the loyalty of their child after they've taken pains to force their offspring to pay for enjoying the security of the familial household? These are questions which many of the Founders were very intent to discuss in the 1760s and 1770s, but which Dickinson seemed reluctant to acknowledge. Perhaps the reason for this stemmed from an inability to truly reconcile the two halves of his philosophical and moral universe, the Enlightenment of his education and the Quakerism of his upbringing. Harmonious though they seemed in many aspects, and in which harmony Dickinson seemed most comfortable, the crises facing the residents of the Thirteen Colonies in the 1760s and 1770s seemed to expose a critical incongruity between the extremes of Quaker pacifism and the Enlightenment’s veneration of natural liberty. This incongruity arguably came to dominate Dickinson’s subsequent career as a revolutionary and early American statesman, and to this day significantly colors how he has been remembered.

Friday, November 6, 2015

Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania III, Part I: Context

Having spent perhaps more weeks than any of us intended discussing all things relating to Benjamin Franklin, it strikes me as almost natural to transition into an exploration of the life and works of another worthy Pennsylvanian whose fame at the dawn of the Revolution spanned the colonies from the Gulf of Maine to the Golden Isles. I speak, as I'm sure I don’t have to tell you, of one John Dickinson. In so many ways the equal of Franklin – both popular colonial advocates in their day, both having served as Presidents of Pennsylvania, and both having spent a significant number of years in Britain  – one would yet be hard-pressed to find two men more unalike in temperament, origins, or treatment by posterity. For as hard-scrabble and self-made as Franklin’s rise to fame was, Dickinson’s was defined by privilege and prosperity. As unpretentious and sardonic as was Franklin’s public persona, Dickinson’s was markedly formal, restrained, and cautious. And while Benjamin Franklin has become wholly ensconced in the popular imagination, with his bifocals and kite-flying, John Dickinson languishes in comparative obscurity. For this reason, and because his pre-1770s writings were undeniably important to the discussions about sovereignty, liberty, and natural vs. traditional rights that took place during the subsequent meetings of the Continental Congresses, a sample of Dickinson’s work will form the topic of this forthcoming series of posts.

Specifically it is the third of Dickinson’s famed Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, published in 1767, upon which we will turn our critical eye. Written in response to the passage of the Townshend Acts, the twelve Letters very eloquently dissected the true nature of the challenge said legislation represented and encouraged the general population of the Thirteen Colonies to remain vigilant of their rights and guard them against potential abrogation. Though initially published anonymously, Dickinson’s authorship became well-known in short order and gained him considerable fame in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the Revolutionary War (1775-1783). Consequently Dickinson became one of the most influential voices in the colonies, second perhaps to Benjamin Franklin, and was one of the leading lights of the First and Second Continental Congresses when they convened in 1774 and 1775. While any number of the dozen Letters that Dickinson penned between 1767 and 1768 present a potentially fruitful avenue of investigation, Letter III is of particular interest for the delicate balance it seems to strike between an outright call to resistance and a caution against rash action. Unlike Letter I or Letter II, both of which present fairly unambiguous cases against British actions aimed at one or all of the Thirteen Colonies, the third in the series seems far more characteristic of the restrained, principled, and at-times frustratingly equivocal position Dickinson found himself in once the crisis between the colonies and the Crown reached its tipping point in 1775/76. Attempting to understand the nature of the apparent contradiction in Dickinson’s outlook as recorded in Letter III may thus provide a deeper understanding of his general ideology, as well as shed light on the oft-ignored spectrum of beliefs that existed during the Revolutionary Era between Patriot and Loyalist.    

But first, of course, some background.

John Dickinson was born in 1732 on his family’s long-established tobacco plantation in Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Named Croisadore (Cross of Gold), the farm had been established several generations earlier by his English, slave-owning, Quaker great-grandfather Walter Dickinson, who emigrated to Virginia in 1654 and purchased the initial 400 acre plot on the Choptank River in 1658. Walter’s son William and grandson Samuel between them increased the family holdings to 9000 acres spread across five farms in three Maryland counties, and purchased a further 3000 acres in Delaware along the St. Jones River. All of the Dickinsons’ plantations were predicated on the use of slave labour, and proved exceedingly profitable. John Dickinson, son of Samuel, thus entered the world in a position to want for very little. As was customary among the Southern planter class, Dickinson’s parents educated their son at home for the first dozen-or-so years of his life. Paid tutors were thus a frequent part of young John’s upbringing on his father’s Poplar Hall plantation in Kent County, Delaware, most notable among them Francis Alison (a Scottish-educated clergyman) and William Killen (later the first Chief Justice of Delaware). At age eighteen Dickinson departed for Philadelphia, the largest and most cosmopolitan city in British North America, where he studied the law under English barrister John Moland. In 1753, at age 21, he then departed for England to further his education at the fabled Inns of Court. Dickinson’s four-year sojourn in the seat of empire would prove to be one of the most influential experiences of his life, and greatly shaped his perceptions of Anglo-American relations and British culture and politics, as well as his own sense of self-identification.

For the record, the Inns of Court were, and are, a collection of four professional/educational associations (Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, Middle Temple, and Inner Temple) located in the City of London that hold certain exclusive privileges concerning members of the English legal profession. They are the sole authority permitted to call qualified students who have been properly examined to the bar; thus, no person may become a barrister in England or Wales without also being a member of one of the Inns. While this is no longer a major function of their existence, having become more professional guilds than schools, during John Dickinson’s lifetime the Inns were also the premier purveyors of a legal education in the British Empire. For an American colonial to receive an education at one of the Inns was considered a sign of particular wealth and refinement to which only the most well-to-do could aspire. The norm for most young men in the American colonies seeking to enter the legal profession was to study under an established barrister for a number of years, read the classic texts of the English Common Law (Blackstone’s Commentaries chief among them), and take the bar in their respective colony. Studying at the Inns was far beyond the means of the great majority of families in colonial America, and so Dickinson’s time at Middle Temple, between 1753 and 1757, represented both a personal as well as familial achievement.

In addition to an unparalleled legal education, Dickinson’s years in London also furnished him with a distinct affection for certain aspects of British culture as well as an appreciation for his own status as an American subject of the British Crown. Letters sent home to his parents, always addressed as “Honored Mother” and “Honored Father”, attest to the variety and depth of feelings that exposure to the sights and sounds of London elicited in the young lawyer-in-training. A visit to the House of Lords provoked disappointment, at the apparent shabbiness of the surroundings as well as of the men who occupied them, while attendance at the birthday reception of George II brought forth feelings of pity for the monarch who seemed rather despondent when not exchanging, “only banal pleasantries with those around him.” The nightlife, meanwhile, proved much more engaging. Between trips to the theatre to witness some of the finest actors of their generation ply their trade, walks in Vauxhall Gardens on the south bank of the Thames, and time spent on the Mall before St. James’s Palace, Dickinson expressed great delight in having the opportunity to experience what one of the great cities of the world had to offer. “It cannot be disputed,” he dutifully wrote his parents, “that more is learnt of mankind here in a month than can be in a year in any other part of the world.”

Yet, for all that he came to enjoy of London’s bustle and sophistication Dickinson expressed occasional reservations about the naked ostentation and unbridled displays of ambition he was daily presented. Raised by parents of devout Quaker sensibilities, he was accustomed to far more modest surroundings and manners. He accordingly came to question the purpose of attempting to attain advancement within Britain’s elite circles if the reward was only, “to see a king at a little nearer distance or to wear a blue ribbond[.]” Though his family connections allowed generous access to much of what the London had to offer, Dickinson seem unwilling or unable to forget that he was a native son of the British empire’s far distance colonial periphery. Poplar Hall was no St. James’s Palace and Philadelphia was a far cry from the seat of empire, yet they were, and always would be, home. The resulting feelings of ambivalence, of marvelling in the achievements of British culture while remaining fundamentally separate from them, would go on to inform much of Dickinson’s response to the crisis that emerged between the Crown and the American colonies in the 1760s.

Upon his return to Philadelphia in 1757 Dickinson took the colonial bar and began a practice of his own. After first building up a reputation for himself as a lawyer he entered the world of politics in 1760 by being elected to the colonial assemblies of both Delaware and Pennsylvania (possible due to his residency in both colonies). Four years later he became embroiled in a debate with one of Pennsylvania’s leading citizens, Benjamin Franklin, over the latter’s calls to do away with the proprietary model of colonial governance then in force. Unlike contemporary New York or Massachusetts, Pennsylvania was not a direct subject of the Crown, but rather continued to fall under the authority of the family of its founder William Penn. As of 1764 the proprietorship was held by William’s son Thomas, an English-born convert to Anglicanism who spent most of his tenure in office attempting to lessen the power of the long-established Quaker faction in the Pennsylvania Assembly. Thomas Penn’s wrangling with the Quakers led to calls for the abolishment of the proprietary government and the re-charter of Pennsylvania as a royal colony, to which effort Franklin lent his then-considerable prestige. Dickinson, a personal friend of the Penn family who had been regularly hosted by Thomas during his time in London, conversely found himself one of the most influential voices in favor of maintaining the status quo. While the conservative faction ultimately succeeded, in that Penn family rule remained in place, Dickinson’s public position cost him his seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly.

This, it turn out, was only a minor setback. The passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 once again thrust Dickinson into the forefront of Pennsylvania politics when said colony chose him as its representative at the resulting Stamp Act Congress. Convened in New York City in October, 1765, the Congress was the first meeting of elected representative from several of the Thirteen Colonies whose purpose was to decide upon measures of protest and resistance to British taxation. Members of the Massachusetts legislature set events in motion by submitting a letter to their fellow colonists recommending a meeting of representatives from the various colonies in order to “consult together on the present circumstances.” Though action taken by several royal governors, and in some cases a lack of interest, prevented every colony invited from sending delegates, nine ultimately responded in the affirmative: Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, and South Carolina. The Congress first convened on October 7th, 1765 at what was then New York City Hall (later renamed Federal Hall after it played host to the first inauguration of George Washington in 1789).  

Though at 33 Dickinson was the youngest of the three Pennsylvania delegates – third-youngest overall after Delaware’s Thomas McKean at 31 and South Carolina’s John Rutledge at 26 – he was nonetheless chosen to pen the body’s petition/declaration of principles. Intended to assert to the Crown and to Parliament both the continued loyalty of the colonists as well as the limits to which that loyalty extended, the Declaration of Rights and Grievances also made a point of stating unequivocally that all Americans possessed the same rights as Englishmen, that trial by jury was one such inviolable right, and that there was to be no taxation of colonial commerce without proper representation of the colonies in Parliament. Though the British Parliament did ultimately repeal the Stamp Act in 1766, they did so largely in response to the boycotts on British goods organized in many of the colonies rather than in acknowledgement of the rights the colonists claimed they possessed. Indeed, the subsequent passage of the Declaratory Act, which asserted the authority of Parliament to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever”, and the Townshend Acts made it quite clear that the British government was by no means prepared to concede to its American subjects any portion of its accustomed authority. 

Because the Townshend Acts were what Dickinson was responding to with Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, a brief description of exactly what they were would seem in order. First, as the name suggests, the Townshend Acts were a series of legislation passed by Parliament over the course of 1767. The first, approved in June of that year, was the Revenue Act, a measure devised by Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend (hence the name) in order to circumvent what he believed was the root of colonial objection to the previous Stamp Act. Townshend understood, incorrectly, that the colonists rejected the Stamp Act, a tax on almost all forms of paper sold in British America, because it represented an excise on their internal commerce. By instead taxing the importation of items that could not be produced in the colonies, including glass, lead, paint, and tea, Townshend believed the Revenue Act would be acceptable in a way the Stamp Act was not. This attempt to once more assert Parliamentary prerogatives was joined in the same session by the Indemnity Act, which cut taxes on tea imported to Britain so that it could more easily be re-exported to North America. Because tea was one of the items covered by the Revenue Act it was reasoned that the loss of revenue in Britain would be made up by that collected in the colonies. The logic Townshend initially deployed to back the passage of these acts was essentially the same as that of the Stamp Act, the collection of revenue in order to help defray the cost of maintaining a British military presence in North America. By the time the Revenue Act reached the floor of the House of Commons, however, the Chancellor had instead decided to use the accumulated returns of the new taxes to pay the salaries of the various governors and justices then serving in the colonies. As these salaries had previously been the responsibility of the colonial legislatures, this particular aspect of the Revenue Act was essentially a means by which the executive and judicial branches of the various colonial governments could be made beholden to Parliament rather than to the citizens of British North America.

The final two pieces of legislation usually included under the umbrella phrase “Townshend Acts” were the Commissioner of Customs Act and the New York Restraining Act. The former created an American equivalent to the British Board of Customs, to be headquartered in Boston and tasked with enforcing the collection of excise duties and guarding against attempts to circumvent taxation of imported goods by means of smuggling. While this proved in itself to be a highly inflammatory measure, particularly where it combined with the expanded search powers granted by the Indemnity Act, the New York Restraining Act was significantly more draconian. In response to the refusal of the New York Assembly to comply with the terms of the Quartering Act of 1765, whereby British troops were permitted to house themselves on private property and at colonial expense, Townshend determined to suspend the power of said Assembly until they agreed to acquiesce. This represented a complete abrogation of what colonists believed was their sovereign right to political representation, made all the more offensive by the fact that it was mandated by a legislature in which said colonists had no representation. Though the New York Assembly ultimately appropriated the proper funds in order to comply with the Quartering Act before the Restraining Act went into effect, they did so without any reference to either piece of legislation and in the same breath asserted that it was beyond the authority of Parliament to suspend the operation of any colonial legislature. Thus a potential crisis was averted, and the lengths to which Britain was willing to go to enforce obedience upon its American subjects was revealed. It was within this climate of mistrust and mutual intransigence that John Dickinson first sat and laid pen to paper in the creation of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. A potential turning point had been reached, he felt, and it was necessary for someone to take account of what came next and what was at stake.