John Dickinson, The Penman Who Almost Said No

On the second of August, seventeen seventy-six, most of the delegates to the Continental Congress signed their names to the Declaration of Independence. One of the most prominent figures in that room refused to sign. His name was John Dickinson, he represented Pennsylvania in Congress, and his refusal to put his name to the Declaration has obscured for many Americans just how indispensable he was to everything that followed.

Dickinson had been the most widely read political writer in the colonies since the late seventeen sixties, when his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania were published and reprinted across the Atlantic world. He had articulated the constitutional argument against Parliamentary taxation more precisely and persuasively than almost anyone else. He was not a loyalist. He simply believed, in the summer of seventeen seventy-six, that independence was premature, that the colonies needed a stronger confederation first, that the moment was not yet right.

He made his position known, then, uniquely, stayed away from the vote so that Pennsylvania and Delaware could deliver favorable tallies without him having to change his publicly stated position. He was protecting the vote, not opposing it, a distinction the historical record took a long time to recognize fairly.

What Dickinson did next settled any question about his commitment. Within months of the Declaration being signed, he led Pennsylvania militia in the field, and in seventeen seventy-seven he served as a private in the Kent County militia, a rank far below what his political stature entitled him to claim. He then became the primary author of the Articles of Confederation, the governing document that held the new nation together until the Constitution replaced it. He represented Delaware at the Constitutional Convention, though illness sent him home early, and Delaware became the first state to ratify the Constitution in December of seventeen eighty-seven.

He was born in Maryland, lived most of his life in Pennsylvania, but Delaware claimed him most fully in the end, and his home just outside Dover, now preserved as Poplar Hall, sits quietly in the flat farmland as one of the most undervisited landmarks in American constitutional history.