The slogan “no taxation without representation” (attributed to James Otis of Massachusetts) spread through the colonies, and the Pennsylvania Assembly sent Dickinson to New York as one of its representatives to the ad hoc Stamp Act Congress. It was clear to the delegates that the new law was unacceptable, but thanks in large part to Dickinson’s leadership they stopped short of fomenting a crisis, instead urging civil disobedience—resolving to conduct business as usual, as if the Stamp Act did not exist.
Though not himself a Quaker (for one thing, he couldn’t bring himself to forswear using force in a defensive war), Dickinson drew upon his familiarity with the faith to propound a democratic philosophy of human rights in Friends and Countrymen, a broadside he published in 1765. Rights come not from kings or governments, he asserted, but from God, and thus belong to every man. This expansive view of rights and equality set the tone for the treatment of rights in the Declaration of Independence 11 years later.
Dickinson tried a back-door approach to a reputedly sensible British statesman, William Pitt the Elder. In a letter to Pitt, Dickinson noted that sentiment for independence was growing in the colonies and that Parliament was to blame. He also made the dire prediction that a severance of ties with Britain would divide the colonies from one another, too, leading to “Centuries of mutual Jealousies, Hatreds, Wars and Devastations; till at last the exhausted Provinces shall sink into Slavery under the Yoke of some fortunate Conqueror.”
In March of 1766, the Stamp Act was repealed, but Parliament soon passed the Townshend Acts, so called after Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer whose brainchildren they were. One of the five new laws imposed taxes on paper, lead, and paint; another protected the East India Company against competition from tea smugglers; and a third pressured New Yorkers to quarter British soldiers on their land. Public response was so tepid, however, that Dickinson was moved to gather his thoughts into a thoroughgoing analysis of where Parliament had gone wrong.
The British Constitution is not a document but an accrued web of precedents, rules, and relationships among the Crown, Parliament, and the people. As explained by the historian Forrest McDonald in his introduction to a modern edition of Letters, “Americans needed someone who could state their case in such a way as to make king and parliament out as radical innovators, and themselves as defenders of ancient traditions.” Dickinson became that someone. Adopting his persona of a farmer—albeit one who could cite Tacitus, Cato, Montesquieu, and Hume as readily as he could milk a cow—between December of 1767 and February of ’68 he published a dozen closely reasoned essays in the form of letters to “My dear Countrymen” in two Philadelphia newspapers; they were reprinted elsewhere in the colonies, as well as in London, Dublin, and Paris.