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Episode 359: 'Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania' by John Dickinson
00:31:41
John J. Miller is joined by Jane E. Calvert to discuss 'Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania' by John Dickinson.
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- [00:07]
A
Hello, and welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about Letters From a Pennsylvania Farmer by John Dickinson. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review and listening to a production of National Review. Our guest is Jane E. Calvert, who's the director and chief editor of the John Dickinson Writing Projects. She's taught at St. Mary's College of Maryland, the University of Kentucky, and Yale University. She's the author of Quaker Constitutionalism and the Of John Dickinson. In her new book, published recently by Oxford University Press's Penman of the A Biography of John Dickinson. She joins us by zoom as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan. Jane, welcome to the Great Books Podcast.
- [00:51]
B
Hi. Thanks for having me.
- [00:52]
A
Why is Letters From a Pennsylvania Farmer by John Dickinson a great book?
- [00:58]
B
Well, I will say at first that it's not technically a book. I think you already know that. It's a pamphlet, which is a form of communication that really kind of came to prominence in the Revolutionary era. We can sort of read about the entire Revolution through pamphlets. And it was a great one for a number of reasons. Dickinson had several purposes in writing it. He, in the first place, wanted to educate Americans about their rights and liberties, and he wanted them to know how to protect those rights and liberties, and he wanted them to understand themselves as Americans with an identity distinct from their identity as Britons.
- [01:47]
A
We're gonna talk about all that, what this pamphlet says. What's a pamphlet? Who was John Dickinson? This founding father who's often forgotten. Jane, let's just jump right into the opening line of letters. A Pennsylvania farmer. It's this quote, I am a farmer, settled after a variety of fortunes near the banks of the River Delaware in the province of Pennsylvania, unquote. So, Jane, my question is, is that a pack of lies? Because I think John Dickinson was a lawyer and not a farmer. Also resident of Delaware, not Pennsylvania. What's going on here?
- [02:23]
B
No, it's not a pack of lies. He was indeed a farmer. He was a gentleman farmer, like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson. And he took as much interest as they did in planting and seeds and husbandry of various types. He actually was the owner of a plantation in Kent county, which now is in the state of Delaware, but at the time was one of the three lower counties of Pennsylvania. So Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn, and it included the upper counties, which we now still consider to be Pennsylvania, and Newcastle, Kent and Sussex. And Dickinson grew up in Kent county, and he inherited the plantation that his father owned. So, yes, he was Indeed, a farmer. And he did live in Pennsylvania.
- [03:15]
A
He did write with a pseudonym. He didn't put his name, John Dickinson, on the pamphlet initially. Why not? And did people actually know it was him?
- [03:25]
B
It's a good question. He didn't put his name on it initially for a couple of reasons. So it was not uncommon that people during this time period wrote with pseudonyms because there was no freedom of the press or freedom of speech as we have it today. Someone could be, if they were seen as undermining the government or attacking the government in some way, they could be charged with seditious libel. And so writing with a pseudonym and maybe not spelling out people's names entirely, leaving blanks, that was a way to protect not just your. Yourself, but also the printer. So you would have plausible deniability. But Dickinson also frequently adopted pseudonyms because he didn't want the weight of his reputation to sway people. He wanted the force of his argument to sway people. So people did realize that this was John Dickinson by about. It was in the spring in 1768, after the. The letters had been republished in pamphlet form, after they had been published in the newspapers, and people figured out that it was Dickinson and then. But he was also, for the rest of his life, known as the Pennsylvania Farmer. But, yeah, these two main reasons were why he wanted frequently to use a pseudonym.
- [04:52]
A
So what did he want to say in the voice of a Pennsylvania farmer that was so controversial? He didn't use his real name, at least not at first.
- [05:00]
B
We often look at the American Revolution as kind of a foregone conclusion. And Dickinson is often seen as a, quote, unquote, conservative because he did not want the revolution, but he was actually more properly understood as a radical. He was putting out ideas about resistance to the government that were really quite radical and ideas of rights. And so what he was putting out there many people saw as inflammatory and very dangerous. And in fact, in England, he was celebrated and vilified in more or less equal measure. And there was. There was even talk in Parliament of his being executed for this.
- [05:51]
A
He was prompted to write letters from a Pennsylvania farmer by something called the Townsend Acts. What were these? And why did they get him so riled up?
- [06:00]
B
These were a series of five acts, four of which went into effect in 1767 and one in 1768. So these were a series of acts that Dickinson believed severely limited American freedoms and were potentially extraordinarily dangerous because they were intended to kind of test out what the colonists would be willing to accept. And by Parliament, they did several Things most concerning, they were to raise a revenue on the colonists by taxing things like glass and lead paint, paper, tea. And then they also restricted their rights and liberties by enforcement of these things, withdrawing power from the New York legislature to pass laws or to even meet as a legislature or trying Americans far away from home with unfriendly judges, not in their own home courts, but in an admiralty court. And so Dickinson was very concerned about all of these as precedents, that if Americans accepted them, they would more or less be sort of the way they put it kind of hyperbolically was they'd be fastening their own shackles onto their wrists. And so he was very concerned that Americans resist these from the very beginning and not acquiesce. Because in, in British law, if you actually acquiesced to legislation that was more or less set that as a legal precedent, and then you could never kind of go back and say, well, actually, no, we don't think that this is legal. You've already given it the stamp of legality if you obey it. And so he wanted people to resist these acts from the very beginning so that they couldn't become entrenched and worse, legislation passed later on.
- [08:02]
A
Was he concerned essentially with taxation without representation? In other words, he said, parliament, you can regulate our commerce, you have that ability, but you cannot tax us colonists.
- [08:14]
B
Yes, that's exactly right. Pretty much all Americans at this time recognize that under the mercantile economic system that they lived under, it was not just allowable, but beneficial for, for Parliament to regulate trade. But regulating trade was one thing. Raising revenue on the colony, on the colonists, was something else. And that was allowable because they did not have representation in Parliament and they could never have representation in Parliament. So, yes, it was. It was acceptable to regulate trade, but not to raise the revenue.
- [08:49]
A
So he gets upset about this. He starts writing about it. These, these letters initially appear in the Pennsylvania Chronicle. Then they're combined 12 essays essentially into a pamphlet. Jane, what's a pamphlet? This is a medium that, that we don't really have anymore in our wild world of journalism and media today. We really don't have pamphlets anymore. What's a pamphlet?
- [09:13]
B
Yeah. So there were various ways, sort of apart from newspapers. Yes, you could publish something, an article in the newspaper, kind of an op ed type thing. Dickinson chose to publish a series of letters. There were 12, and they appeared in about every couple of weeks or every week or so for a few months. And yet then they were combined and published as a pamphlet. And they appeared in newspapers first, like around the Colonies, and then in many, many pamphlet editions. And so the pamphlet was more than a single page stitched together and then sold at print shops and read in coffee shops and in taverns, other places where people congregated. And so people would read them to themselves. They would read them out loud. They were really kind of the intellectual currency, the colonies. They were, you know, relatively inexpensive and easy to distribute. And so, yeah, they, they, they spread ideas very quickly and easily. And. And I think maybe they fell out of fashion as the printing trade really picked up in the early Republic. And we get many more magazines, like many more newspapers and, and many more magazines, and then pamphlets kind of fell by the wayside. And you're right, I think we don't haven't really had for spreading ideas except maybe now online. You know, something like substack could be sort of a digital equivalent.
- [10:50]
A
The most famous pamphlet from this period, maybe of all time is Common Sense by Thomas Paine, 1776. A real radical call for American independence. I've heard that Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer was the most important American political document before that. Do you agree with that?
- [11:13]
B
Absolutely. And historians have sort of revised their estimates as well of the publication of the farmer's Letters. In relation to common sense, I think, you know, Common Sense is certainly the most famous pamphlet, most famous publication of the American Revolution. Absolutely. But before then, the farmer's Letters were absolutely the most famous. And they made Dickinson a celebrity. And I don't mean just known or famous. Benjamin Franklin was famous. He was famous among the elite as a scientist. But Dickinson became a celebrity. And by that, I mean he was known among all ranks of men and many women and around the Atlantic world as far and as far away as Poland. And the sort of the fans he acquired and even the haters, he was just really idolized by many people on both sides of the Atlantic and not just in the American colonies, but in Canada and down in Florida. And so, yes, he was known. And there were tributes made to him, poems written, toasts made, statues. People named things after him, like their taverns and their ships and a stud horse. And I mean, really, he became the sort of undisputed spokesman for the American cause after. Not just after the farmer's letters, but he followed that up by publishing America's first patriotic song, which just really solidified his celebrity.
- [12:51]
A
So listeners may be wondering, if he was such a big deal, how come we haven't heard of this guy? Because he's not in the front ranks of America's founding fathers. We don't Think of him alongside Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and so on. And part of the reason for that may be because he did not call for, for independence, as you suggested. You call him America's first celebrity. In your book, Penman of the Founding, you also call him a trimmer. What do you mean by that?
- [13:26]
B
So trimmer was a nautical metaphor that was appropriated by political commentators. And a tremor could mean one of two things and actually kind of polar opposite. So a tremor in nautical terms could be someone who trimmed the sails of a ship to go with the prevailing wind. Now in political terms, that would be an opportunist. And most people don't have lots of respect for political opportunists. On the other hand, a trimmer was also the person who shifted the ballast in the hold of the ship. So the weight of the cargo in the hold of the ship in order to keep the ship from capsizing and to keep it on a straight course. So if it listed to the right, he would move the ballast to the left and vice versa and thereby make sure that the ship sailed straight and true towards its destination. And so that's what we would call sort of a principled political actor. Dickinson was the latter. He was the principal political actor. He set his sights on American liberty and he shifted his weight, his considerable weight to one side or the other in order to keep the ship of state on the, the, on the straight and true. And that person, typically, everybody wants him on their side. And though when he, when he goes to the opposite side, he tends to be vilified by, by those who he's not supporting. But Dickinson's not wanting independence and his refusal to vote on or sign the Declaration of Independence did not seriously damage his reputation in his lifetime. It's our mistake that we don't see him as an equal with the other major founders, the people who you named. And the reason for that is a lesson in what we call historiography, sort of the history of history. And basically the early historians in the 1840s, specifically George Bancroft, when he wrote his multi volume work on the American Revolution, he vilified Dickinson. He was writing in what we call the Whig tradition of history, which basically saw the Revolution as a foreordained, divinely ordained event and that it was going to happen inevitably. And he held John Adams up as a hero and then he used Dickinson as the antihero, the foil to Adams. And he really painted Dickinson in very unflattering terms and criticized him and made him just look like a Terrible human being. And then after that, it was difficult for people to really paint him in any other light because his papers were not available. And if you want to write about a founder, you need access to his or her papers. And, and that's why we have multi volume editions of the papers of George Washington, of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, all the big people. But no one had done that for Dickinson until I came along to do the John Dickinson Writings Project. And we're about to publish volume four, which takes us up to 17 through 1769. So really it is. We have been. The American people today have more or less been victims of earlier historians who basically just wrote, quote, unquote, winners, history. So, you know, Dickinson was seen as a loser, so he was more or less written out of the story. But you really cannot have an American Revolution, or at least not a successful one, without understanding the critical role Dickinson played both before and after the Declaration of Independence.
- [17:39]
A
So you're trying to restore the good name of one of the earliest voices for American liberty.
- [17:46]
B
Yes, absolutely.
- [17:47]
A
The title of your book is Penman of the Founding. Why does he deserve that name? That's quite a claim. And I would say, who's the penman of the Founding? I would say, oh, Thomas Jefferson. He wrote the Declaration of Independence. Why does John Dickinson deserve that nickname, Penman of the Founding?
- [18:05]
B
That was not a nickname he had during his lifetime. He originally got a similar nickname. In 1897, a scholar named Moses Coit Tyler coined the term Penman of the Revolution. But I've never liked that, because Dickinson, he did not want a revolution. Everything he wrote before independence was designed to avoid revolution and secure American rights and liberties through peaceful means. So, you know, it's accurate in the sense that what he wrote really did lead to revolution, but it wasn't his aim. And so when I wrote the biography, I wanted something that was more accurate. Accurate and also captured really more of the scope of what he wrote and what he contributed. Because as I said, the work he did before independence was only the first half of his career. And he continued to contribute to the American cause at least as much after independence as he did before.
- [19:12]
A
So what did he do after the Declaration of Independence comes around? Did he continue to resist the cause or did he, he. Did he take it up himself, American.
- [19:21]
B
Revolution in the first place? He was resisting the cause only insofar as he was attempting to delay declaring independence as long as possible. He actually did more than almost any single figure to prepare America militarily, to prepare America for war and Then after the Declaration was passed, he immediately joined the battalion he'd raised and commanded as colonel and, and deployed to the front to meet the British. And then he was also the only leading figure and actually the only gentleman I'm aware of who then enlisted as a private to serve in the militia with a musket upon his shoulder. And then he served in many offices. In fact, over the course of his career, he served in more offices than any other leading figure. And so he went on to serve in the Pennsylvania assemb, again In Congress in 1779, he was president, I.e. governor of Delaware. Then he. Then he was elected president of Pennsylvania, an office he held for a while simultaneous with his presidency of Delaware. And he was the chairman of the Annapolis Convention that met to amend the Articles of Confederation. He was an active participation participant in the Federal Convention. Then he was the president of the Delaware Constitutional Convention. And then final, he served in the Delaware legislature. And then after that went in retirement, he still led citizens groups and he wrote pamphlets and he even wrote legislation for Delaware, Pennsylvania and the United States and worked behind the scenes to get it passed. And he ran for office for the last time in the fall of 1807, just a few months before he died.
- [21:23]
A
He died in 18 oh. Born in 1732. So long life. Engaged in public life really for his entire adult life. Before the Revolution. After the Revolution, one of the biggest, most controversial topics that surrounds many of the founding fathers is slavery, because these are people who wrote that all men are created equal and also were slaveholders. There's a kind of paradox there. Contradiction. It's certainly a problem. John Dickinson held slaves. What did he make of slavery?
- [22:02]
B
Well, I would say that Dickinson is the only one of the leading founders who actually took that phrase in the Declaration of Independence seriously, that all people are created equal. He understood that line much more as we do today, as opposed to how his contemporaries saw it. So, yes, he was an enslaver. And he inherited the enslaved people he had from his father. And he started to have really, he never liked it, but he started to have very serious qualms about it in the. In the early 1770s. And then at his soonest opportunity, after the passage of the Declaration of Independence, he returned to his plantation in outside of Dover and he began the process of freeing the people he enslaved. So he first wrote a manumission deed in the spring of 1777, and it conditionally manumitted all of his the people he enslaved. And then in 1781, he freed a few unconditionally and then in 1786, he freed the remainder unconditionally. And then he really became an abolitionist, and he wrote abolition legislation for Delaware there and tried multiple times to get it passed, and was really very concerned that the slave trade be ended. And he hoped that slavery was on its way out. And he had good reason to think it was because it was being gradually abolished in the northern colonies. And so he, like many people, thought that the southern colonies would fall up.
- [23:50]
A
One of the most amusing parts of your book involves the nose of John Dickinson. And there's a passage in your book that just had me laughing out loud as I was reading it. But what's the deal about John Dickinson and his nose?
- [24:04]
B
He seems to have had a fairly prominent nose, which you can notice in some of the depictions of him, not so much in the paintings, but there's some etchings that. That, you know, you can. You can see. See that. And, you know, people noticed it. He. He wants. He. He had some. He had political enemies, and one time, one of his political enemies, Joseph Galloway, the two had been sort of antagonizing each other for many years. And I think Galloway must have said some really provocative things. And the two men ended up in. In what seems like some kind of a fist fight on the steps of the State House coming out of a session. And I think Galloway made a grab for his nose and Dickinson challenged him to a duel. And it was all very sort of unseemly. And then during the same era, what you're referring to is a pamphlet that came out very sort of silly parody kind of on the political scene in Pennsylvania. And there's this alleged. The Society of Noses. It's supposed to mean the Society of Friends, the Quakers. And Dickinson was kind of seen as the leader of the political Quakers. And so they have him against Benjamin Franklin, who was on the other side of this controversy. And then there's this depiction of them facing each. And Dickinson has this kind of long, kind of floppy hook nose, and Franklin has this stubby little pug nose. And there's a poem inside that makes this kind of lewd equation of noses with certain male body parts.
- [25:59]
A
It just goes to show that humor and satire and mockery have been a part of American politics since the very beginning. Beginning, Absolutely.
- [26:08]
B
This is not a new thing today.
- [26:10]
A
Now, how did you discover John Dickinson as a scholar and become so interested in the guy that you wanted to devote your scholarship to him?
- [26:20]
B
Well, it was a. It's a surprise to me. I actually had no interest in studying the Revolution. I wanted to study the colonial period. And I thought I really, frankly had nothing, nothing worthwhile to contribute to the scholarship of the, of the founding era. And, and I, I had even less interest in studying a founder. And as I was working on my. My doctoral dissertation and studying Quakers, you know, kind of all sources seemed to point to the American Revolution. And then this guy's name kept coming up the farther I got into the revolutionary period in the 1760s. And I thought, well, who is this person? I'd never heard of him. And, and then the more I tried to find out about him, I just found confusion. I found historians just not knowing what to make of him. But I saw this person who really identified very strongly with, with Quakers and Quakerism, but himself was not a Quaker. And, and that made sense to me because I'd gone to a Quaker college and I hadn't really learned much about them in college. And what I did learn, I didn't care for a whole lot. And then when I got out and was studying colonial religion and politics and Quakers came up everywhere and, and I started learning about them and studying their theology. And then I started attending meeting. And I, you know, Quakers are very interesting, and there's a lot I like about them, but I myself never wanted to become a Quaker. And so I understood Dickinson. You know, someone who would be, as the. The Quakers call, a fellow traveler, someone who agrees a lot with Quaker beliefs but never, you know, doesn't want to actually be a Quaker in name. And that's Dickinson. And so he himself would. He never. He would never become a Quaker because he believed, as he put it in the lawfulness of defensive war. That is, if a people is attacked, they have the right to defend themselves. And Quakers did not believe in any kind of war, so he couldn't agree with them there. And he disagreed with them on other issues, like they believe that children should have what they called a guarded education. So, you know, protect them from worldly influences to, you know, keep them from sinning as long as possible. And Dickinson believed very, very strongly in a liberal arts education. So there were some things he just couldn't agree on with Quakers. But he looked the part, he sounded the part. He dressed like a Quaker. He spoke like a quake. He adopted many of their causes, like abolitionism and women's rights and prison reform and these other similar causes. So, yeah, he made sense to me. And once I realized that, I realized I should probably explain him one final.
- [29:15]
A
Question then about John Dickinson. What's the case for reading letters from a Pennsylvania farmer today. It obviously has historical importance if you want to understand the revolution. This is a great document to but does it have a special message for us today? Does it speak to us in the 2000 and twenties?
- [29:35]
B
It does, absolutely. And when I would assign this to my students, they loved it because it's very accessible. Dickinson was writing to ordinary Americans, trying to explain to them what it meant to be an American, what it meant to protect their rights and liberties and to do so peacefully, preserving the unity that Americans shared. And you know, in this time when we are so politically divided and there's so much tension among Americans and so many misconceptions about rights and liberties and new legislation and what it means, quite great potential to violence and some of our political leaders stirring up violence. And so I guess I would leave people with a quote that to me, really speaks to our present moment. And it is this, Dickinson said, I hope, my dear countrymen, that you will in every colony be upon your guard against those who may at any time endeavor to stir you up under pretenses of patriotism to any measure disrespectful to our sovereign and our mother country. Harmony. Hot, rash, disorderly proceedings injure the reputation of a people as to wisdom, valor and virtue without procuring them the least benefit. So he and his writings are even more relevant today than they have been at almost any other time since the Revolution.
- [31:12]
A
Jane Calvert, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer by John Dickens.
- [31:18]
B
Thank you so much.
- [31:20]
A
You just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Send me your ideas for future episodes. You can reach me through our website@heymiller.com on Twitter, my handle, ismiller. And last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week, the new episode of the Great Books Podcast.