The Constitution described by John Dickinson in his “Letters of Fabius” is a model of prudence and moderation, based not primarily on theoretical arguments, but on experience and an extensive knowledge of history. Though virtually ignored by scholars in recent decades, John Dickinson was one of the most influential of the American Founders. When he [...]
No one who reads and digests “A Better Guide Than Reason” can fail to be revolutionized. We had thought that the great Southern political tradition—that of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, and the agrarians—was dead. Not so. A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution by M.E. Bradford (241 pages, Sherwood Sugden [...]
The said states hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defence, the security of their Liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, [...]
Of all the men significantly involved in the major events leading up to and following from the American Revolution none has been so undeservedly neglected by our political historians as the mysterious John Dickinson. The oversight would seem on its face unlikely. For this planter and prototypical Philadelphia lawyer is as complicated and intellectually interesting [...]
When Thomas Jefferson expressed the common sense of the subject of independence in 1776 in the Declaration, he and Congress relied on the intellectual and philosophical convictions first expressed by John Dickinson nearly a decade earlier in “Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer.” Viscounted Foolishness When the Rockingham ministry fell in 1766, one of the most [...]
The Cost of Liberty: The Life of John Dickinson by William Murchison Few habits of speech and thought inhibit our appreciation of those who created the United States of America more than our tendency to refer to them as “the Founders.” Not that the Founders do not form an identifiable group, and not that they are undeserving of [...]
Though I’m only about 200 pages into Robert Middlekauff’s massive 1982 history of the American founding, The Glorious Cause, I’m willing to take a chance and label it not just a “good book” but a “great book.” Middlekauff not only possesses sheer mastery over the era—as though he lived in it—but he’s never afraid to [...]
John Dickinson’s standing in the American pantheon is shamefully obscure in view of his contributions toward the establishment of an independent regime of limited government, federalism, and liberty under law. Having studied eighteenth-century America all our adult lives, we are prepared to offer a generalization: the more one learns about the subject, the less prone [...]
Honor, justice and humanity call upon us to hold and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty, which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children; but it is our duty to leave liberty to them. No infamy, iniquity, or cruelty can exceed our own if we, [...]
This handsome man is not one of the better known faces of the era that some people, for reasons that vary, like to call our “Founding” as a “Nation.” He died on February 14, 1808, and since then has inspired two (!) biographies—one by Charles Stille in 1891, the other by Milton Flower in 1983. [...]