LIVES OF THE FOUNDERS
EDITED BY JOSIAH BUNTING III
ALSO IN SERIES
AMERICAS FORGOTTEN FOUNDERS
Edited by Gary L. Gregg II and Mark David Hall
FORGOTTEN FOUNDER, DRUNKEN PROPHET:
THE LIFE OF LUTHER MARTIN
Bill Kauffman
AN INCAUTIOUS MAN: THE LIFE OF GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
Melanie Randolph Miller
RISE AND FIGHT AGAIN: THE LIFE OF NATHANAEL GREENE
Spencer C. Tucker
AMERICAN CICERO: THE LIFE OF CHARLES CARROLL
Bradley J. Birzer
FOUNDING FEDERALIST: THE LIFE OF OLIVER ELLSWORTH
Michael C. Toth
THE COST OF LIBERTY
T HE L IFE OF J OHN D ICKINSON
William Murchison
WILMINGTON , DELAWARE
For my grandchildren, Brody and Margo,
born into an era of tumult:
that they might hear, and take comfort from,
a tale of fortitude and greatness in the teeth of tumult
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
ISI B OOKS ESTABLISHED THE Lives of the Founders series to study important figures of the American Founding who have been unjustly forgotten. The United States is certainly indebted to the work and thought of such legendary Founders as Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Franklin, and Hamilton. But the truth is that hundreds of other men and women made considerable contributions to the Founding.
Moreover, Americas course was by no means preordained. When and whether to declare independence from Britain, how to prosecute the Revolutionary War, the precise structure of the new American governmentthese and many other issues were the subject of serious, and often fierce, debate. By studying lesser-known but influential figures, we get a fuller sense of the contending ideas, controversies, struggles, and particular circumstances that shaped the trajectory of American history.
ISIs Lives of the Founders series reintroduces many of these important thinkers, highlights their contributions, and gets to the bottom of why they have fallen into obscurity. The animating spirit of the series can be seen in the book Americas Forgotten Founders, which features the results of the first-ever scholarly ranking of neglected Founders and profiles the top ten forgotten Founders. The other works in the series tell the individual stories of Founders whose names and deeds deserve to be studied and rememberedfigures like Luther Martin, the Anti-Federalist polemicist; Gouverneur Morris, who wrote large parts of the Constitution; Nathanael Greene, who after Washington was the most important American general of the War for Independence; Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence; and Oliver Ellsworth, a vital force in shaping the Constitution as a Federalist document.
And now ISI is excited to present The Cost of Liberty, the first full biography of John Dickinson to appear in a half century. As William Murchison demonstrates in this finely rendered portrait, it is something of a travesty that Dickinsons name is not included among the first rank of American Founders. When Dickinson is remembered, it is usually for something he chose not to doa decision that has earned him a black mark in many quarters. Murchison corrects the record at last, helping us understand what a principled decision it was. More important, he reveals the outsized contributions Dickinson made to the American cause from the 1760s all the way through the late 1780s.
By examining the lives and thought of forgotten Founders like John Dickinson, we can more fully understand the underpinnings of our nation. They allow us to understand the principles and philosophies that guided the Founders, the debates in which they engaged, and how the results of those debates have shaped our country ever since.
THE COST OF LIBERTY
INTRODUCTION
THE MOST UNDERRATED OF ALL THE FOUNDERS
M ODERNS WHO MAKE THE acquaintance of John Dickinson can be forgiven for finding him, on the whole, both irritable and irritatinghardly the Founding Father likeliest to be singled out, from a room ablaze with talent and inspiration, for some after-hours jollity. He would not be the man to call for punch all around and a lively tune from the fiddlernot with the prospect of a split from the mother country weighing heavily upon his mind and soul.
In HBOs much-honored 2008 series John Adams, Mr. Dickinson of Pennsylvania is the specter at Americas birthday festivities. While a stick-thumping Adams summons his countrymen to arms and independence, Dickinson, with stricken look and half-shut eyelids, urges caution, demands conciliation, foresees ruin should the mad dash to freedom continue. Replying to such arguments, Adams declares stoutly, Where he foresees apocalypse, I see hope. I believe, sir, that the hour is come. A toast, sir, to Mr. Adams! As for poor Dickinson, let us make room for him as The Man Who Would Not Sign the Declaration of Independence.
Matters are little different, substantively, in the Broadway musical, and movie, 1776. A brassier Dickinson faces down Adams with sarcasm and swagger. He hurls at him names and reproaches: incendiary little man, madman, and such. The two go at each other with their sticks until separated. The audience knows the direction this tumultuous pathway leads. Once more the course of human events will find the gentleman-ruffian from Pennsylvania standing apart from the jubilation and rejoicing.
Well, not totally apart. Both John Adams and 1776 do Dickinson the minimal justice of acknowledging that, having failed to temper his colleagues enthusiasm for immediate independence, he rode away to serve the colonial cause in uniformsomething only one actual Declaration signer, Thomas McKean, did. (He fought for what he could not vote for, the historian Carl Bridenbaugh has deftly said of Dickinson.)
Still, need we bestow on the gentleman any further thought? Only, perhaps, if we want to understand one of the most complex and influential figures of the entire revolutionary period, someone who was present at all the major assemblages where thinkers and activists charted the young nations path. At every turn he offered counsel both eloquent and sober. The historian Forrest McDonald has called Dickinson the most underrated of all the Founders of this nation.
The eclipse of John Dickinsons once-formidable reputation, his reduction to the role of Adamss theatrical foil, is among the ironies and accidents of history. It has to do almost entirely with Dickinsons deeply held doubts regarding the colonies capacity to achieve independence. The necessity of independence he had come, however slowly, to acknowledge. Was it necessary, all the same, that the task be accomplished according to John Adamss timetable? The perils of precipitate action were large and, equally to the point, largely unexplored. Dickinson, a venerated tribune of the colonists cause, counseled precaution and delay. Modern reactions are preordained: How could this man not stand with the great Adams, the great Jefferson, and the other greats at that moment we mark every year with flags and fireworks? We shall examine the matter in its right sequence.
There is much else to examine in the life of a patriot who wrote with force and intellectual brilliance many of the revolutionary eras major documentspamphlets, petitions, and speeches, by turns forceful and intricate. He wrote a patriotic songand probably would have written the Declaration of Independence had he been as hot as Adams to strike off the mother countrys shackles at that precise moment. His
