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.
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