Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
stoutly to be counted for God and the King. In laying bare the heart
of Toryism, he unwittingly gave aid and comfort to the detested cause
of liberalism. It is reasonable to assume that such militant loyalty
to the outworn doctrine of passive submission was a real disservice to
the ministry, for it revealed the prerogative in a light peculiarly
offensive to American prejudices. What a godsend to the liberals was
such doctrine on the lips of so eminent a divine!
Footnotes
[202] _Diary and Letters_, Vol. I, pp. 46-48.
[203] See Hosmer, _Life of Samuel Adams_, p. 259.
[204] Hutchinson, _History of Massachusetts Bay_, Vol. III, p. 255.
[205] “Answer of Bernard to the Petition of the House of
Representatives to the King,” in _Works of Samuel Adams_, Vol. I, pp.
365-367.
[206] Quoted in John Adams, _Novanglus_, Second Letter.
[207] See his _Life of Thomas Hutchinson_.
[208] Quoted in _ibid._, p. 189.
[209] _Ibid._, p. 206.
[210] Hutchinson assumes the act of incorporation will lay restrictions
upon the right of suffrage and the powers of the town meeting.
[211] _Ibid._, pp. 206-207.
[212] _Ibid._, p. 199.
[213] _Resolves of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts Bay_,
June 16, 1773.
[214] _Ibid._, p. 436. Compare the view of Van Tyne, _The Causes of the
War of Independence_, p. 85.
[215] Speech of January 6, 1773.
[216] _History of Massachusetts Bay_, Vol. III, pp. 381-382.
[217] _Answer of Bernard to the Petition of the House of
Representatives._
[218] For Hutchinson’s statement of the Tory case, see Vol. III, pp.
352-355.
[219] _History of Massachusetts Bay_, Vol. III, p. 399.
[220] _Works_, Vol. X, pp. 194-195; quoted in Tyler, _Literary History
of the American Revolution_, Vol. I, Chapter XVI.
[221] Preface to _Novanglus and Massachusettensis_, 1819.
[222] Letter of February 6, 1775, in _Novanglus and Massachusettensis_,
pp. 187-188.
[223] _Ibid._, pp. 152-153.
[224] Letter of January 2, in _ibid._, p. 159.
[225] Letter of December 19, in _ibid._, p. 147.
[226] Letter of March 27, in _ibid._, pp. 217-218.
[227] _Ibid._, p. 219.
[228] Letter of January 9, in _ibid._, p. 171.
[229] Letter of January 23, in _ibid._, p. 181.
[230] _Ibid._, p. 225.
[231] _A View of the Causes, etc._, p. 591.
[232] _Ibid._, p. 309.
[233] _Ibid._, pp. 507-508.
[234] _Ibid._, p. 306.
[235] _Ibid._, p. 313.
[236] _Ibid._, p. xliv.
[237] _Ibid._, p. 504.
[238] _Ibid._, pp. 509 and 511.
[239] _Ibid._, p. 309.
[240] _Ibid._, Preface, p. xlii.
[241] _Ibid._, p. 525.
[242] _Ibid._, p. 534.
[243] _Ibid._, pp. 535, 538, 542, 543.
Chapter III • John Dickinson • The Mind of the American Whig
For many colonials it was a hard and bitter choice that was thrust
upon them by the political situation. They had no wish to choose
between loyalty to the British Empire and love for their native land.
So long as the quarrel remained a legal dispute over parliamentary
encroachments, colonial sentiment was fairly united in opposition to
the ministerial policy; differences of opinion arose over methods of
defense, rather than the need of it. The threatened loss of home rule
drew together radical and conservative. Although Governor Hutchinson
asserted that the feeling against England was the work of a small
populistic element--“in Massachusetts Bay the exception to the
constitutional authority of Parliament was first taken, and principally
supported, by men who were before discontented”[244]--it is clear
that the active Tory party numbered at first few more than the royal
officials and their beneficiaries. But when it came to the point of
severing colonial relations with the mother country, comparatively few
among the upper classes in the northern and middle colonies went with
the party of independence. The moderate men, the conciliationists,
were crushed between the two extremes, and the Tory party was greatly
increased in numbers and influence.
Of this moderate party of conciliationists, the outstanding figure
during the years of tedious debate was John Dickinson, of Philadelphia.
His _Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer_, published between December 2,
1767, and February 15, 1768, created considerable stir both in America
and England, and if Hutchinson may be trusted, they “formed a temporary
political creed for the colonies.” Later he was chief draftsman of a
notable series of state papers: the Declaration of Rights of the Stamp
Act Congress; the two Petitions to the King and the Address to the
Inhabitants of Quebec of the first Continental Congress; and finally
the Articles of Confederation. Professor Tyler has fastened upon
him the title of “penman of the Revolution”; but a juster title, and
more in accord with the facts, would be “spokesman of the Colonial
Whigs.” From his first entrance into public life to the adoption of
the Constitution, Dickinson was a consistent advocate of the political
philosophy of which John Pym was the early representative, Locke
the philosophical defender, and Pitt the parliamentary advocate--a
philosophy which he accepted as the final embodiment of the long
struggle for English freedom.
English Whiggery has been fortunate in its advocates. It has been
expounded with great fervor and glossed with much eloquence. Its ends
have been so persistently proclaimed as at one with the cause of human
liberty, that in the mind of English-speaking people it early became
synonymous with English liberalism. In so far as it represented a
protest against divine right, such an interpretation was historically
just. It was the expression of a rising class, and every rising class
in its ostensible program professes to be liberal. But in the outcome
Whiggery proved to be very different from generic liberalism. Examined
critically the program of Whiggery is seen to have been compounded
of substantial economic interests. Although the Whig party created
the modern House of Commons and ministerial government, and wrote
into the British constitution the principle of no taxation without
representation, back of such revolutionary changes was a middle-class,
property theory of society. It laid down as the first principle of
political science the dogma that government is instituted for the
protection of property; and it advanced by inevitable stages to the
position that government should use its powers to extend the field of
profitable operations and safeguard exploitation, the natural outcome
of which was a policy of imperialism. On the pretense of furthering
human liberty it carried the British flag and British goods to the ends
of the earth. The great Pitt, grandson of the unscrupulous exploiter of
India, completed the work begun by John Pym more than a century before;
the American Revolution was the natural sequence of an imperialistic
policy begun by Cromwell’s Navigation Act, which, aimed immediately
at the Dutch carriers, put the power of the government behind British
shipping to the disadvantage of American competitors.
The philosophy of Whiggery had spread widely in America before the
Revolution and numbered among its advocates probably the great
majority of thoughtful Americans. Of these John Dickinson became
the best known, although he was certainly not the ablest--less
able, indeed, than his fellow Marylander, Daniel Dulany. Of Quaker
extraction, Dickinson was a country gentleman who inherited broad
acres, an honorable name, and high social position. His dignified
standing was further assured by his marriage with the only surviving
child of Isaac Norris, long Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and
the most influential amongst a little group of wealthy merchants who
had long ruled the commonwealth in patriarchal fashion. By his wife he
came into possession of Fairhill, a country place of several hundred
acres on the outskirts of Philadelphia, one of the show places of the
city, of which the mansion with its stately façade, its waxed floors
and red-cedar wainscoting, its books and paintings and statuary,
its setting of gardens and fishponds and conservatories, was vastly
impressive to a world that loved dignified display.
With such advantages of wealth and position he could hardly fail to
get on in his profession, and within a short time after his return
from the Inns of Court at London, where he had his training in the
law, he became one of the leaders of the Philadelphia bar and was
soon deep in commonwealth politics. He was a gentleman in a society
of gentlemen and preferment came easily to him. His natural parts
were respectable, he had improved himself by considerable reading in
history and politics, he possessed a cultivated pen and some facility
in debate. He understood commercial problems, could talk trade, was
ready with statistics of imports and exports, and was an advocate of
the paper money which Philadelphia merchants had discovered to be a
stimulus to business. Among his intimate friends were Robert Morris,
Thomas Willing, and George Clymer, representatives of the younger
generation of Philadelphians, whose speculative enterprises were not
approved by their conservative elders. And so by consequence he became
the spokesman of the mercantile interests in their remonstrance against
the ministerial policies.
But Dickinson was more than a legal adviser to clients who were in
trade. As lawyer and statesman he was true to the best traditions of
the English law and the British constitution, faithful to what he
conceived to be the larger interests of the British Empire. In all his
public acts he was animated by a scrupulous sense of duty, swerving no
whit from the line of conduct marked out by his principles in spite
of the clamor of opposition. From first to last he seems to have been
guided by a fine sense of responsible stewardship that came to him
from his English heritage. Certainly the dignity of John Dickinson
and the integrity of his political career suffer little by contrast
with certain popular representatives who governed their conduct by
expediency rather than principle. The great ideal of imperial unity
possessed him completely, and he would do nothing to bring it into
jeopardy. He sacrificed his great influence with the radicals by his
refusal to go with the majority for independence; he would not assist
in disrupting the British Empire even though he could not preserve it.
The refusal was difficult and it destroyed his popularity in a moment.
He withdrew from active participation in political affairs, and for
years afterwards, to the eyes of former associates, his conduct seemed
to have been pusillanimous.
By temperament and breeding Dickinson was a conservative, and this
native bias was emphasized by his English training in the law. The
lawyers of the middle and southern colonies were far better trained
than those of New England. Many were from the Inns of Court, where
they had steeped themselves in the Common Law and had imbibed profound
respect for the orderly processes of English legal procedure.
They found intellectual satisfaction in tracing the evolution of
constitutional practice, and their methods of thought were too strictly
legal to suffer them to stray into the domain of extra-legal political
speculation. Their appeal was to the law and the constitution; never to
abstract principles. If, on the other hand, the revolutionary leaders
of New England--and Virginians like Jefferson and Patrick Henry--were
poorer lawyers they were better political scientists, for their legal
training had been too casual and too scanty to contract their minds to
statutes and precedents. Jefferson and John Adams were alike in this
respect; their interests were speculative rather than legal; and they
wrote more convincingly when defending the principles of Locke than in
expounding Coke.