Jane E. Calvert’s excellent new book The Penman of the Founding makes a strong case that understanding John Dickinson is necessary for a robust appreciation of the American Founding. The Pennsylvania patriot justly earned a reputation for moderation, but that can sometimes cloud his commitment to revolutionary principles. Calvert’s book is an important recovery of Dickinson’s political legacy.

As a young man, Dickinson studied law in London at the Middle Temple and upon his return to the colonies became a rich and well-respected lawyer. He served in Pennsylvania’s colonial assembly and became a “celebrity,” Calvert tells us, for his 1767 pamphlet protesting British taxation, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. But Dickinson was much more than a pamphleteer. He also served in the governments of Pennsylvania and Delaware, the Continental Congress, and at the Philadelphia Convention. His influence on the early stages of the Revolution should not be understated.

Despite his prominence, previous treatments of Dickinson have been lacking primarily because scholars have not had access to all his papers. Thus, they often repeated partisan distortions produced by his contemporary opponents, particularly John Adams. Calvert, however, has seemingly read every surviving scrap of Dickinson’s writings and, therefore, knows more about him than any other scholar. According to Calvert, Dickinson exemplified a specific style of republican politics, strongly influenced by Quakerism, that stressed unity and compromise to preserve liberty. 

Compromise thus defined Dickinson’s politics. Calvert sees Dickinson as a “trimmer,” a term taken from sailing. Not to be mistaken for political opportunism, political trimming “shifts the ballast in the hold to prevent the ship (of state) from capsizing or sailing off course by listing too far to the right or left.” In Calvert’s portrayal, Dickinson shifted positions with the goal of preserving “American liberties” and a strong Union rather than enhancing his own power or fortune. Dickinson’s was a politics of moderation. Whereas George Washington was celebrated for his Fabian tactics in war, Dickinson employed the same style in politics. He was always willing to “trim”—and thus take losses—to maintain unity toward the goal. 

Equally important, Calvert attributes Dickinson’s style to his affinity for Quakerism. Although Dickinson was not an official member of the Quaker meeting due to his rejection of pacifism, he was a “fellow traveler.” Building on her 2009 book, Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson, Calvert shows how Dickinson exemplified Quaker principles by seeking solutions that preserved peace and the “unity of the polity.” Moreover, Quakers used law and procedure to win freedom within the system as opposed to using violence to assert their rights. Dickinson tried to maintain this approach throughout his career. 

Dickinson needed to trim, Calvert demonstrates, because the divisions among the American Whigs made concerted action difficult. In Pennsylvania, the differences resulted from both conflicting political philosophies and hostility to Quakerism. One incident from 1764 illustrates the problems. Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Galloway, Dickinson’s rivals, wished to end the proprietary government of the Penn family and transform Pennsylvania into a royal colony with a royal charter. While Dickinson was home suffering from a fever, Franklin and Galloway presented to the Assembly a petition to the King asking him for a royal charter. Hearing of this, Dickinson, still ailing, returned to his seat in the Assembly to argue against the petition. 

As Calvert tells it, Dickinson presented a pragmatic case aimed at preserving the civil liberties granted by the colony’s proprietary charter. He argued that the petition was not well timed; Franklin and Galloway were relying on royal discretion at a time when Parliament was changing its approach to governing the colonies. Indeed, Dickinson had apparently heard rumors of the coming Stamp Act. Additionally, he noted, the king could impose Anglicanism with a new charter, which would threaten the liberties not only of the Quakers but of the many dissenting groups in the colony. Despite his impassioned appeal, Dickinson lost the debate, and the Assembly submitted its petition to the king. During the proceedings, Galloway made a snide remark, provoking Dickinson to break character: he struck Galloway and challenged him to a duel. Cooler heads prevailed—the duel was called off—but Dickinson’s speech was printed and became a model for the Quaker side of Pennsylvania’s political divide.

To his contemporaries, Dickinson’s most confusing and infuriating instance of trimming was his political posturing between the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775 and the Declaration of Independence a year later. During 1775, Calvert notes, Dickinson became convinced that violence between the colonials and the British could result in a political solution short of independence. To achieve this, Dickinson believed that the Continental Congress should simultaneously petition the King for negotiations while preparing for military action. This approach, he believed, could speed negotiations and thereby mitigate violence. This would achieve Dickinson’s goal of preserving American liberties while honoring Quaker principles. Thus, Congress in 1775 offered the Olive Branch Petition and “A Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms,” both written primarily by Dickinson. Calvert notes that Dickinson’s strategy confused many congressmen. A frustrated John Adams called Dickinson a “piddling genius” in a letter to Joseph Warren and attributed bad motives to the Pennsylvanian. The British intercepted and published the letter, embarrassing Adams. But Dickinson remained focused on his goal of preventing British aggressions against colonial liberties. In other words, he continued trimming.

The events of 1776 made Dickinson’s trimming harder. He continued to oppose independence while also working toward uniting the colonies. In June, he drafted a document to change the Pennsylvania Assembly’s instructions to its delegates to Congress. While the previous orders directed delegates to oppose a decisive break with Britain, the new directive allowed them to vote their consciences—indirectly granting permission to vote for independence. Dickinson also worked on a draft of the Articles of Confederation that month. But on July 1, 1776, Dickinson spoke in Congress against independence. He argued that Americans should continue to support peaceful protest, with the goal of bringing about reconciliation. These measures had worked previously and could succeed again. He also stressed that Americans were divided over the question of independence and not ready for war. War, he asserted, was a horrible choice that should be avoided if possible. Americans should cement their union before risking the vicissitudes of war. 

But he lost the debate in Congress. Calvert writes of Dickinson’s dissent, “In the Quaker tradition, after a member of the meeting has spoken his mind but the body has resolved to go in a different direction, for the sake of unity, the dissenting member must step aside to allow the body to move ahead.” Dickinson then abstained from voting for independence or signing the Declaration of Independence. Calvert maintains, however, that “if patriotism means placing country before self, Dickinson suppressed every sentiment of foreboding in his heart and threw himself entirely behind the American cause.” Dickinson later served as a private in the Pennsylvania militia. His actions angered all sides. Radicals in Pennsylvania attacked him politically, and, later, the British burned one of his homes.

During the 1790s, Dickinson became a Jeffersonian Republican. In state politics, he opposed the radical democrats who wished to tear down the institutional structures that slowed the implementation of popular will. Dickinson thought such radicalism was both foolish and dangerous to the cause of liberty. He also supported the French Revolution and despised the rise of Napoleon. By 1805, he feared that liberty was endangered by extremism on both political sides. As he told his friend Thomas McKean, “Moderation is a Law of our Nature.” Liberty thus required wise and restrained leadership.

Calvert concludes by proposing Dickinson as a model for our times. But, while she shows that Dickinson was certainly an admirable man, we should be aware that his political approach bears some risks. Dickinson’s politics were profoundly shaped by his understanding of the limits of political action. That principle, however, sometimes conflicted with Dickinson’s Quaker sympathies. The problem with the trimmer is that he must select a goal and be willing to sacrifice many things for the achievement of that prospect. But what happens when those things sacrificed are significant? The case of slavery is the most obvious example.

As Calvert notes, Dickinson had long grappled with slavery. Before the Revolution, Dickinson invoked natural rights, not simply the rights of Englishmen, in support of colonial claims. He believed rights came from God and thus lay beyond the power of government. This perspective influenced his views on slavery. Dickinson owned many slaves and for some time, Calvert details, tried to make peace with the institution by treating them mildly. That was not enough. Beginning in 1777, Dickinson began manumitting his slaves. At first, he worked slowly. But in 1786 he freed them all, at considerable cost to his estate, making him “the only leading figure of the era to do so.” 

While his private actions were commendable, Dickinson, as a national politician, witnessed his trimming style of politics at work in the compromises over slavery during the Constitutional Convention. Calvert notes that at the Convention, Dickinson spoke out against both the three-fifths clause, suggested by James Wilson who had worked in Dickinson’s law practice, and the proposal to allow temporarily the transatlantic slave trade. But he lost on both issues. Sincerely opposed to slavery, Dickinson worked unsuccessfully in Delaware to end the institution. He also failed to convince his brother to manumit his slaves. In the case of slavery, the trimming of his colleagues conflicted with Dickinson’s moral condemnation of slavery, leaving that cancerous issue for later generations. For that there would come a mighty reckoning: the Civil War. 

In his trimming ways the “Penman of the Revolution” profoundly shaped the paths that the new republic would tread. Dickinson appreciated popular rule but opposed unbridled democracy. He supported self-government but cultivated disinterestedness in power, believing that those who sought power were unworthy to exercise it. Dickinson recognized the need for serious social and political reform but counseled, “Experience must be our only guide; Reason may mislead us.” While he advocated a division of power in the American republic, Dickinson did not trust in structural protections of liberty alone. As Calvert details, he thought republics required a moral foundation and thus advocated laws against gambling and failing to keep the Lord’s Day. Even though he belonged to no organized church, he recognized the importance of religion to the American republic.

Dickinson’s moderation, in many ways, then, made American republicanism workable while recognizing that Americans had difficult issues yet to solve. Calvert concludes her book with Dickinson’s wish, “I trust, that the Principles that have been my political guides, will diffuse their blissful Influences on Ages, yet unborn.” It was Dickinson’s moderation that is his greatest legacy.