Honor and Oblivion
“The love of fame,” wrote Alexander Hamilton, is “the ruling passion of the noblest minds” (Federalist 72). But—also in the noblest minds—passion bows politely to reason, and the love of fame is tempered by love of the true and the good. Fame is the height of honor on the grandest scale, and the noblest minds will want to be honored only for what is most worthy of honor. They don’t seek the applause of fickle opinion here and now, but the respect of the wise and good of all times and places; ultimately, they want to be measured by what is worthy in the eyes of God.
What is most worthy of honor deserves to be remembered. “Old men forget,” as Shakespeare’s King Henry V proclaims at Agincourt, “yet all shall be forgot,” before oblivion shrouds in darkness the most worthy deeds. These will be remembered “from this day to the ending of the world.”
No human deed, in the whole “course of human events,” surpasses the American Revolution—bringing forth “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Rightly will the names of those happy few, that band of brothers—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Adams—be remembered to the ending of the world.
There is one of those few whose name we have largely “forgot.” He knew at the time that in acting as he thought honor required of him, he was consigning himself to oblivion. Only devoted students of these things today have even heard of him, but, as one of his biographers has written, in the years leading up to the American Declaration of Independence, “John Dickinson, apart from Benjamin Franklin, was probably the American known to more [of his countrymen] than any other.”
He was recognized as “the chief spokesman for American rights and liberty.” His writings during this period did more than any other to defend and define the American cause. In the literature of the Revolution, in the words of another scholar, Dickinson was “as pre-eminent as Washington in war [or] Franklin in Diplomacy.” He won this distinction chiefly by a series of 12 letters written in the winter of 1767-68, in response to several acts of the British Ministry and Parliament which violated the rights of the American colonists.
At that time, 23 newspapers were published in the colonies, and 19 of them printed all 12 of these Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies. Pamphlet editions were immediately published in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Williamsburg, London, and Paris. Dickinson was called “the American Pitt,” after the silver-tongued British Prime Minister William Pitt. In Paris salons, “the Pennsylvania Farmer” was compared to Cicero. Not until Thomas Paine’s Common Sense appeared in 1776 was any product of an American pen so acclaimed, on both sides of the Atlantic, as the Farmer’s Letters.
In the decade leading up to July 4, 1776, Dickinson played a leading role in the successive continental assemblies that carried forward the American Revolution and forged the 13 separate colonies into one nation. He was a representative of Pennsylvania at the Stamp Act Congress in 1765 and the chief author of that Congress’s petition to the king, along with its “Declaration of Rights and Grievances.” He was a member of the First Continental Congress, and again had a hand in drafting the historic proclamations of that assembly.
In the Second Continental Congress, Dickinson co-authored with Thomas Jefferson the “Declaration on the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms,” to be read by the new commander in chief, George Washington, to his assembled troops in Cambridge. He wrote the original draft of the Articles of Confederation, submitted to Congress on July 12, 1776.
All Honor to Jefferson
Only a handful of the greatest Americans can be said to have evoked the spirit and molded the form of the revolution and the founding as tellingly as did John Dickinson, the Pennsylvania Farmer. And yet, the prophecy of his contemporary Ezra Stiles has—for some two and a half centuries at least—largely proven true: “He now goes into oblivion,” wrote Stiles of Dickinson, “or a dishonorable reminiscence with posterity.”
If the love of fame is the ruling passion of the noblest minds, John Dickinson’s was a mind strongly tinctured with nobility. He was avid of the good opinion of his countrymen. He spoke and wrote repeatedly of his gratitude at winning and his desire not to forfeit their esteem. Yet in the crowning act of his political career, the act above all others for which he knew he would be remembered, and by which all his other words and deeds would be measured, Dickinson willingly and with full deliberation cast his celebrated name into obscurity and ill repute.
In a brief (somewhat famously inaccurate) recollection of the most historic moment in the deliberations of the Second Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson reveals the cause of the “oblivion” into which the name of Dickinson would fall. Of that Congress, Jefferson recalled, the American Declaration of Independence was “signed by every member except Mr. Dickinson.”
“All honor to Jefferson,” wrote Abraham Lincoln:
To the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
Lincoln meant that Jefferson had no need to assert in the American Declaration of Independence the universal truth that has ever since been recognized as America’s central idea: that “all men are created equal.” Americans could have declared independence just on the grounds that their charters or their rights as Englishmen had been violated. But inserting in the Declaration that “abstract truth applicable to all men and all times” made all the difference; it became America’s “philosophical cause,” as Lincoln put it. It made America itself an eternal rebuke to tyranny in any form.
But there is another reason to honor Jefferson, and thinking about it helps provide a fuller measure of his statesmanship, and statesmanship itself. John Dickinson, Jefferson’s fellow revolutionary and founder, agreed wholeheartedly with the “abstract truth” proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. In the decade leading up to the Declaration, no American had done more than Dickinson to illuminate America’s crisis in light of this truth. But Dickinson disagreed with the concrete, merely revolutionary act of a single people that the Continental Congress debated on July 1, 1776, and on July 2 resolved to take. He didn’t think Americans should declare independence right then, as they famously did. It was this practical disagreement that would forever—or for centuries—remove Dickinson’s name from the pantheon of American heroes. And Dickinson would not think that was unjust.
Proponents of independence in July 1776 did not have to convince their countrymen that “all men are created equal.” John Dickinson, among others, had successfully established this truth as the common sense of the nation by this time. Advocates of independence had to convince their fellows of the concrete, merely revolutionary measure to be taken by a single people on behalf of these abstract truths. They had to convince them that they should declare independence, and that this was the moment to do it.
Like all of us in critical moments, John Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson could not foresee the outcome of the struggle they were beginning. Actions, chances, and decisions that would determine the success or failure of their cause were locked in the impenetrable future. Yet a decision was called for now. Looking back on that fateful choice years later, Dickinson wrote that the achievement of independence “has proved,” in retrospect, “that the national council was right” in declaring independence when they did, and that he was wrong in opposing it.
Even this may be saying too much, before first determining whether declaring independence, when Americans did, advanced or impeded their achieving it on satisfactory terms. Nevertheless, it must be said that Thomas Jefferson deserves all the honor that Lincoln bestowed on him, not only for inserting in the Declaration the immortal American idea, but also for the “merely revolutionary” measure he supported at that crucial moment.
John Dickinson, on the other hand, for opposing that concrete and merely revolutionary step, would not complain to find that posterity has shuffled him off somewhat into the shadows. In retrospect, Dickinson came to believe that the voice which spoke when Americans chose independence was “the sacred voice of my country…a voice that proclaimed her destiny.” And he accepted full responsibility for standing silent when that voice spoke.
But we should join Thomas Jefferson in honoring Dickinson, as Jefferson did when hearing of his death in 1808: “Among the first of the advocates for the rights of his country…he continued to the last the orthodox advocate of the true principles of our new government.”
