John Dickinson (lawyer)
John Dickinson (1732 - 1808) , the "Penman of the Revolution", was a conservative Philadelphia lawyer, known for urging reconciliation instead of revolution, for which he was later vilified.Dickinson came from a tobacco-farming family that had moved from Maryland to the Lower Counties of Pennsylvania (now Delaware). Tutored at home, and sent to study law at the Middle Temple in London, Dickinson returned to begin in the Pennsylvania legislature by arguing against Benjamin Franklin's fruitless efforts to abolish proprietary colonial government. Dickinson supported the Penn family's inherited claim to broad executive powers in the colony, a matter as fundamental to the slaveholding Quaker Dickinson as the inviolability of personal property. Sent to the Stamp Act Congress in New York in 1765, Dickinson took a leading role and drafted the resolutions that were sent to the King and Parliament.
The passage of the Townshend Acts in 1767 moved Dickinson to begin his series of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767 - 1768) that were published first in the Pennsylvania Chronicle and became a central set of positions for American colonists resisting the new British policies of colonial taxation. But Dickinson urged conciliation, even as a member of the two consecutive Continental Congresses and when presented with the Declaration of Independence, he couldn't bring himself to sign it, a hesitation for which more radical American elements vilified him.
But when war came he volunteered to serve in the Continental Army. He drew up the Articles of Confederation in 1781 under which the American colonists fought the last years of the War and was elected "President" (Governor) of Pennsylvania the same year. He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. There he was a champion of the small states and remained to the end of his life a staunch, Francophile, Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican.
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