Pennsylvania Magazine of HISTORY and BIOGRAPHY

THE Pennsylvania Magazine OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY A Pennsylvania Farmer at the Court of King George John Dickinson's London Letters, 1754-1756 HE modern American political scene has long been dominated by lawyers. The legal profession has contributed many more Tthan its share of presidents, senators, and congressmen; occasionally, a good lawyer even finds a berth on the Supreme Court. But the lawyer's proclivity for politics is far from new. With a few notable exceptions (such as Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin), the American revolutionary leadership of the 1760's and I77o's was predominantly legal in its professional affiliation. Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Adams, James Otis, Daniel Dulany, Jr., William Henry Dray ton, and James Wilson, to offer a selection, were all practicing lawyers at one time or another. They found that their legal education served them extraordinarily well in resolving the proper relationship of their respective provinces to the mother country. Their legal training unquestionably colored their political thinking. As David Ramsay explained in 1789, "no order of men has, in all ages, been more favorable to liberty, than lawyers." When entering the political arena, Ramsay continued, lawyers operated 241 1<\1 H. TREVOR COLBOURN July with a special skill and technique: "while others judge of bad princi- ples by the actual grievances they occasion, lawyers discover them at a distance, and trace future mischiefs from gilded innovations."1 Surprisingly little attention has been given to the lawyer's role in the American Revolution, or to American legal history generally, despite the accuracy of Edmund Burke's remark that "in no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study/'2 One explanation for this historical delinquency might well be the complexity of the lawyer's craft. The "mysterious science" has always presented an intimidating aspect to outsiders, and in the colonial period of Ameri- can history the mysteries of the law were compounded by the indi- vidualism of its practitioners. Colonial lawyers were the victims of their physical and economic circumstances, and their training ranged from the six years' apprenticeship served by Thomas Jefferson to the six weeks' reading program undertaken by Patrick Henry. Lacking professional law schools prior to the Revolution, the colonists' preparation for the bar varied enormously. Some lawyers were, indeed, self-taught. Others gave point and direction to their reading by serving an apprenticeship in the office of a leading local attorney. A fortunate few improved on this by studying at one of London's Inns of Court. The dean of Philadelphia lawyers in the 1730's, Andrew Hamilton, was a Gray's Inn barrister; and his suc- cessor, John Moland, had attended the Middle Temple for three years. It is hardly surprising that after serving in Moland's office, John Dickinson also studied at Moland's alma mater. John Dickinson's three-year sojourn in England has not gone totally unobserved, but, like so much of his career, it has often been misunderstood. Dickinson was born in Talbot County, Maryland, in 1732, the son of Samuel Dickinson, a well-known lawyer and planter, and his second wife, Mary Cadwalader Dickinson. The Dickinson family moved to Dover in Kent County, Delaware, in 1740, where young John Dickinson received his early education from a tutor before beginning his legal training in 1750. His career at law was distinguished but brief, and he abandoned his practice with the advent of the Revolution. 1 David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution (Lexington, Ky., 1815), I, 43. 2 Edmund Burke, "Speech on Conciliation with America/' Mar. 22, 1775, in The Works of Edmund Burke (Boston, 1881), II, 120. 1962 JOHN DICKINSON'S LONDON LETTERS 243 Once hailed as "the penman of the American Revolution/'3 Dickinson earned this rare praise by drafting the resolutions of the Stamp Act Congress in 1765 and writing his J^etters from a Farmer in 'Pennsylvania in 1767 and 1768. For most modern historians, how- ever, Dickinson's contribution to the literature of the Revolution has been overshadowed by his apparent efforts to avoid separation from England in 1775 and 1776. He is better remembered as the author of the "Olive Branch Petition" than as the writer of some of the most memorable and vigorous phrases in the "Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms." His failure to sign the Declara- tion of Independence eclipsed a once-lustrous reputation, and his later career of public service is largely overlooked. But despite his qualms over its timing, he took up arms for independence, headed the committee which drafted the Articles of Confederation, and sub- sequently served as president of Delaware's Executive Council and as president of Pennsylvania. In his last political writing, the "Fabius" letters, Dickinson advocated ratification of the 1787 Constitution and urged fair play for revolutionary France ("She is fighting/or us as well as for herself . ."). In spite of his alleged conservatism, Dickinson died an avowed Jeffersonian. Of all the Founding Fathers, John Dickinson has probably en- joyed the poorest historical press.4 He is still thought of as the colonial conservative who could not face the political realities of the 1770's.5 His legal studies in England, runs the contention, led to a dangerous love affair with his mother country; according to Vernon Parrington, he had "a native bias" toward political conservatism, buttressed "by his English training in the law." Dickinson admired all things English and, Parrington complained, "seems to have remained placidly unaware of the sordid realities of parliamentary huckstering."6 Historians themselves have generally remained 3 Moses Coit Tyler, Literary History of the American Revolution (New York, 1897), II, 24. Tyler probably borrowed the phrase from George Bancroft. 4 If we discount the 1801 edition of Dickinson's Political Writings, which Dickinson himself helped bring forth, we have no convenient collection of Dickinson's public writing. Dickinson has hardly been in a position to defend himself from comments about his "fine-spun theories and hair-splitting distinctions." See John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Boston, 1943), 259. 5 This general view is echoed in the writings of John C. Miller, Merrill Jensen, and Lawrence Henry Gipson. 6 Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York, 1930), I, 222. 244 H* TREVOR COLBOURN July "placidly unaware" of the realities of the author of The Farmer's j£ettersy but with some cause. Dickinson's personal papers were so scattered or inaccessible until recent years that they have yet to be published.7 There still is only one biography of John Dickinson, and when Charles J. Stille wrote it—The jQi/e and Times of John "Dickinson —more than seventy years ago,8 his emphasis was necessarily on the times rather than the life. Lacking firsthand information, Stille padded his early chapters with background generalities, with a result rather like a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings but no turkey. Stille delivered his hero to London's Middle Temple in 1753; four years and fourteen pages later, Dickinson was back in Phila- delphia, but Stille's readers were not much the wiser. If the letters John Dickinson wrote to his parents from London do nothing more than focus fresh attention upon his legal education— and that of his associates—they will justify their survival. While well over a hundred Americans studied at the Inns of Court between 1750 and 1775, few recorded their intellectual experiences with the detail Samuel and Mary Dickinson found in their son's correspondence. John Dickinson's letters provide an unusual perspective on mid-eighteenth-century England; they reveal much of his early political thinking; and they indicate the real influence of his legal studies at the Middle Temple. Dickinson went to England with his eyes and ears open. He did not enroll at the Middle Temple with a na'ive expectation of a systematic training in the law, for despite their reputation as England's third university, the Inns of Court in the eighteenth century resembled Oxford and Cambridge mainly in their common state of decline. Their real value for the serious law student was in their libraries, the learned legal conversations they afforded, and their proximity to the 7 Dickinson's London letters are among the collection donated by his descendant R. R. Logan to the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1945. Leon deValinger, Jr., State Archivist of Delaware, has announced his intention of compiling a definitive edition of Dickinson's correspondence (i.e., this will not include his political writings). Dr. deValinger is, at this writing, well advanced in his preparations, and I acknowledge with gratitude his co-operation. I am also deeply indebted to the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 8 Charles J. Stille", The Life and Times of John Dickinson, 1732-1808 [Historical Society of Pennsylvania Memoirs, XIII] (Philadelphia, 1891). Still6 readily conceded his problems with Dickinson's papers, although he was ambiguous as to his actual research opportunities. See ibid., v. \96i JOHN DICKINSON'S LONDON LETTERS 245 Westminster courts. Some students found such advantages insuffi- cient. Charles Carroll of Carroll ton sneered at the whole system: Nothing can be more absurd than the usual manner of young gentlemen's studying the law. They come from the University, take chambers in the Temple, read Coke [on] Little[ton]: whom they cannot possibly understand, frequent the courts whose practice they are ignorant of; they are soon disgusted with the difficulties and dryness of the study, the law books are thrown aside, dissipation succeeds to study, immorality to virtue, one night plunges them into ruin, misery, and disease.9 But Dickinson knew the limitations of his London situation.

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