Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania

Letters from a farmer in Pennsylvania, to the inhabitants of the British Colonies

Frontispiece and title page of a 1903 reprint of the letters
Author	John Dickinson
Country	British Empire
Language	English
Published	December 1767 – April 1768

Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania is a series of essays written by the Pennsylvania lawyer and legislator John Dickinson (1732–1808) and published under the pseudonym "A Farmer" from 1767 to 1768. The twelve letters were widely read and reprinted throughout the Thirteen Colonies, and were important in uniting the colonists against the Townshend Acts in the run-up to the American Revolution. According to many historians, the impact of the Letters on the colonies was unmatched until the publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense in 1776. The success of the letters earned Dickinson considerable fame.

The twelve letters are written in the voice of a fictional farmer, who is described as modest but learned, an American Cincinnatus, and the text is laid out in a highly organized pattern "along the lines of ancient rhetoric". The letters laid out a clear constitutional argument, that the British Parliament had the authority to regulate colonial trade but not to raise revenue from the colonies, which became the basis for subsequent colonial opposition to the Townshend Acts. The character of "the farmer", a persona built on English pastoral writings whose style American writers before Dickinson also adopted, gained a reputation independent of Dickinson, and became a symbol of moral virtue, employed in many subsequent American political writings. While the Letters start with relatively mild rhetoric, Dickinson gradually increases the intensity and the text culminates in a dire warning against taxation without representation, comparing it to slavery. Dickinson himself was a slaveowner at the time, the largest in Philadelphia, an irony modern scholars have noted.

Background

The passage of the Stamp Act of 1765 ignited a dispute over the authority of the British Parliament to levy internal taxes on its colonies. Facing opposition both from American colonists and British merchants, and under the leadership of a new ministry, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766. However, Parliament at the same time passed the Declaratory Act, which affirmed its authority to tax the colonies. In 1767, Parliament imposed import duties—remembered as the Townshend Acts—on a range of goods imported by the colonies, for the purpose of raising revenue. These duties reignited the debate over Parliamentary authority.

John Dickinson, a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer and member of the Pennsylvania assembly, took part in the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, and drafted the Declaration of Rights and Grievances. In 1767, following the passage of the Townshend Acts, Dickinson set out to clarify the Constitutional question of Parliament's authority to tax the colonies, and to urge the colonists to moderate action in order to oppose the Townshend Acts. His Letters were first published in the Pennsylvania Chronicle, and then reprinted in most newspapers throughout the colonies. The letters were also reprinted in London, with a preface written by Benjamin Franklin, and in Paris and Dublin.

The Letters

Though in reality, Dickinson had little to do with farming by 1767, the first letter introduces the author as "a farmer settled after a variety of fortunes, near the banks of the river Delaware, in the province of Pennsylvania." In order to explain to the reader how he has acquired "a greater share of knowledge in history, and the laws and constitution of my country, than is generally attained by men of my class," the author informs the reader that he spends most of his time in the library of his small estate. The author then turns to a discussion of the brewing crisis between the British Parliament and the colonies.

While acknowledging the power of Parliament in matters concerning the whole British Empire, Dickinson argued that the colonies were sovereign in their internal affairs. British officials believed that while American colonists would not accept "internal" taxes, such as those levied by the Stamp Act, they would accept "external" taxes, such as import duties. However, Dickinson argued that taxes laid upon the colonies by Parliament for the purpose of raising revenue, rather than regulating trade, were unconstitutional. Dickinson argued that the Townshend Acts, though nominally import duties and therefore "external" taxes, were nevertheless intended to raise revenue, rather than to regulate trade. Dickinson further argued that by passing the duties, Parliament intended to establish its authority to tax the colonies and to test the response of the colonists:

Upon the whole, for my part, I regard the late act as an experiment made of our disposition. It is a bird sent over the waters, to discover, whether the waves, that lately agitated this part of the world with such violence, are yet subsided. If this adventurer gets footing here, we shall quickly be convinced, that it is not a phenix; for we shall soon see it followed by others of the same kind. We shall find it rather to be of the breed described by the poet—

"Infelix vates."

A direful foreteller of future calamities.

— Letter XI

More broadly, Dickinson argued that the expense required to comply with any act of Parliament was effectively a tax. Dickinson thus considered the Quartering Act of 1765, which required the colonies to host and supply British troops, to be a tax, to the extent that it placed a financial burden on the colonies. Although he disagreed with the New York assembly's decision not to comply with the act, Dickinson viewed non-compliance as a legitimate right of the assembly, and decried Parliament's punitive order that the assembly dissolve.

In his letters, Dickinson foresaw the possibility of future conflict between the colonies and Great Britain, but cautioned against the use of violence, except as a last resort:

If at length it becomes undoubted that an inveterate resolution is formed to annihilate the liberties of the governed, the English history affords frequent examples of resistance by force. What particular circumstances will in any future case justify such resistance can never be ascertained till they happen. Perhaps it may be allowable to say generally, that it never can be justifiable until the people are fully convinced that any further submission will be destructive to their happiness.

— Letter III

The political philosophy underlying the Letters is often placed in the Whig tradition. The letters emphasize several important themes of Whig politics, including the threat that executive power poses to liberty, wariness of standing armies, the inevitability of increasing overreach should a precedent be set, and a belief in the existence of a conspiracy against liberty.

Literary style

In contrast to much of the rhetoric of the time, much of the letters were written in a mild tone. Dickinson urged his fellow colonists, "Let us behave like dutiful children who have received unmerited blows from a beloved parent." In order to secure the repeal of the Townshend duties, Dickinson recommended further petitions, and proposed putting pressure on Britain by reducing imports, both through frugality and the purchase of local manufactures. In the judgment of historian Robert Middlekauff, Dickinson "informed men's minds as to the constitutional issues but left their passions unmoved."

The style of Dickinson's Letters is often contrasted with that of Paine's Common Sense. In the view of historian Pierre Marambaud, the contrast between "Dickinson's restrained argumentation with Paine's impassioned polemics" reflects the deepening of the conflict between Britain and the colonies—as well as the divergence of political views within the colonies—in the years separating the writing of the two works. A. Owen Aldridge compares Dickinson's style to that of the English essayist Joseph Addison, and Paine's style to that of Jonathan Swift. Aldridge also notes the more pragmatic and less philosophical emphasis of Dickinson's Letters, which are less concerned with basic principles of government and society than Paine's Common Sense, and instead focus more on immediate political concerns. Aldridge compares the character of "the farmer," who contemplates politics, law and history in his countryside library, to the political philosopher Montesquieu.

The classical themes in the Letters—common in political writings of the time—are often commented on. Dickinson draws frequent parallels between the situation facing the colonies and classical history. The second letter, for example, compares Carthage's use of import duties on grains in order to extract revenues from Sardinia to Britain's use of duties to raise revenues in its colonies. Each of the twelve letters ends with a Latin epigram intended to capture the central message to the reader, much as in Addison's essays in The Spectator. The final letter concludes with an excerpt from Memmius' speech in Sallust's Jugurthine War:

Certe ego libertatem, quae mihi a parente meo tradita est, experiar; verum id frustra an ob rem faciam, in vestra manusitum est, quirites.

"For my part, I am resolved strenuously to contend for the liberty delivered down to me from my ancestors; but whether I shall do this effectually or not, depends on you, my countrymen."

— Letter XII

The farmer—described as a man of genteel poverty, indifferent to riches—would have evoked classical allusions familiar to many English and colonial readers of the time: Cincinnatus, the husbandman of Virgil's Georgics and the Horatian maxim, aurea mediocratis (the golden mean).

Slavery as a trope

Dickinson mentions slavery in a general sense a few times early in the Letters, without directly referring to American chattel slavery. As Peter Dorsey notes in Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America, Dickinson carefully builds up a set of references and mentions in order to avoid any "tension between the farmer's moderate tone and his repeated warnings about the imminent enslavement of white colonists; the matter comes to a climax at the end of Letter VII, when he completes the previous indirect mentions: Americans who are taxed without consent are merely slaves. During the time he was writing the Letters, Dickinson was a one of the largest slaveholders in Philadelphia; Dorsey cites this as a "glaring example" of the inconsistency between theory and practice of revolutionary Americans. The first Letter contained nothing about slavery, but in Letter II he wrote about the colonists' hatred for the Stamp Act, "Why then was it universally detested by them as slavery itself?" Dickinson carefully escalated the sense of peril in each subsequent letter. He emphasized in 1768, "Those who are taxed without their consent... are slaves." This comparison, a Whiggish stance, was denounced by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), in Tory fashion; according to Zachary McLeod Hutchins, "Crèvecœur implies that until colonists stop condemning kidnapped Africans to live gibbeting or face that punishment themselves, from the British crown, their hypocritical cries of slavery will continue to ring hollow".

Slavery in the colonies served as a rhetorical device for revolutionary writings, and it shaped the ideas of American freedom. The comparison of the Stamp Act to slavery was an exaggerated metaphor, and Dickinson's argument against the "slavery" of taxation was ironic in that he owned more slaves than any other Philadelphian at the time. A year before Dickinson, James Otis Jr. used the slavery metaphor in a similar context. Crèvecœur's responded to Dickinson's argument about the supposed oppression caused by British taxation and criticized the very trope, according to Zachary McLeod Hutchins: "An avaricious attorney and slave owner like Dickinson, Crèvecoeur suggests, supports oppressive systems far more unnatural and burdensome than imperial governance and the Stamp Act." The trope was used by Stephen Hopkins who wrote in 1765 that "they who have no property can have no freedom, but are indeed reduced to the most abject slavery", and was ridiculed by British satirist Samuel Johnson: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

Reception

Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania had a large impact on thinking in the colonies. Between 2 December 1767 and 27 January 1768, the letters began to be published in 19 of the 23 English-language newspapers in the colonies, with the last of the letters appearing in February through April 1768. The letters were subsequently published in seven American pamphlet editions. The letters likely reached a larger audience than any previous political writings in the colonies, and were unsurpassed in circulation until the publication of Paine's Common Sense in 1776. Prior to the publication of the letters, there had been little discussion of the Townshend Acts in most of the colonies. Dickinson's central constitutional theory was that Parliament had the right to regulate trade, but not to raise revenue from the colonies. Though Dickinson was not the first to raise the regulation–revenue distinction, he expressed the theory more clearly than his predecessors, and this constitutional interpretation quickly became widespread throughout the colonies, forming the basis for many protests against the Townshend Acts. However, Dickinson's interpretation was not universally accepted; Benjamin Franklin, then living in London, wrote of the practical difficulty of distinguishing between regulation and revenue-raising, but nevertheless informed the English public that Dickinson's views were generally held by Americans.

The wide circulation of the Letters was, in part, due to the efforts of Whig printers and political figures in the colonies. Dickinson sent the letters to James Otis, who had them published in the Boston Gazette, which was affiliated with the Sons of Liberty. Dickinson's connections with political leaders throughout the colonies, including Richard Henry Lee in Virginia and Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina, helped ensure the wide publication of his letters. Popular pressure was also brought to bear on printers in Boston, Philadelpha and elsewhere to print the letters, and to refrain from printing rebuttals.

As the letters were published anonymously, Dickinson's identity as the author was not generally known until May 1768, and the character of "the farmer" attained a lasting reputation independent of Dickinson. "The farmer" was the subject of numerous official tributes throughout the colonies, such as a paean written by the town of Boston on the suggestion of Samuel Adams, and was sometimes compared to Whig heroes such as William Pitt and John Wilkes. The letters sparked limited critical reactions in the colonies, such as a series of satirical articles organized by the speaker of the Pennsylvania assembly, Joseph Galloway, which like the original Letters appeared in the Pennsylvania Chronicle. The response to the letters was substantially critical in England. Tory papers in England rebutted Dickinson's constitutional argument by arguing that the colonists were virtually represented in Parliament, and by emphasizing the indivisibility of sovereignty, though these rebuttals were not widely circulated in the colonies. Praise for the letters in English Whig newspapers were more widely reprinted in the colonies, producing a skewed impression in the colonies of the English reaction.

Several colonial governors acknowledged the deep impact of the letters on political opinion in their colonies. Governor James Wright of Georgia wrote to Lord Hillsborough, Secretary of State for the Colonies, that "Mr. Farmer I conceive has most plentifully sown his seeds of faction and Sedition to say no worse, and I am sorry my Lord I have so much reason to say they are scattered in a very fertile soil, and the well known author is adored in America." Dickinson's central constitutional argument about the distinction between regulation and revenue-raising was adopted by Whigs throughout the colonies, and was influential in the formulation of such subsequent protests against the Townshend Acts, such as the Massachusetts Circular Letter, written by James Otis and Samuel Adams in 1768.

The character of "the farmer" also had an enduring legacy, as a symbol of "American moral virtues." Subsequent works such as the anti-Federalist pamphlet, the Federal Farmer, Crèvecœur's Letters from an American Farmer and Joseph Galloway's A Chester County Farmer were written in the voice of similar characters.

External links

• Dickinson, John; Halsey, R. T. Haines (Richard Townley Haines) (1903). Letters from a farmer in Pennsylvania, to the inhabitants of the British Colonies. New York, The Outlook company.
• Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania public domain audiobook at LibriVox