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.
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